The Society of Tomorrow. (1908)

From the September 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The result of all the more or less ingenious plans of the future society is but to demonstrate the possibility of the Socialist System. All who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by the social transformation easily persuade themselves of the excellence of the future society. Even the petit bourgeois – the small capitalist – having the presentiment of his impending ruin, being tormented by the knowledge of his insecurity and filled with a feeling of vagueness, is quite ready to say “Yes, Socialism is an excellent thing, but, alas! it is Utopia!” And to show you the Utopian character of Socialism he invokes, first, human nature; secondly, the indestructible selfishness of humanity that results in the war of each against all; and thirdly, the opposition of those who possess, which he declares impossible to overcome.

How does the Marxian conception comport itself in order to reduce to nothing this triple impossibility?

Human nature! This has been invoked every time there has been any question of advancing a stage in history. The slave-holders called to witness this same human nature in order to clinch the absolute impossibility of the abolition of chattel slavery. In his “Politics”, Aristotle, “the giant of antique thought”, sought to demonstrate that the Greeks are by their very nature destined to dominate the rest of human kind as masters. Nature is eternal. And every dominant class desires – quite naturally – to eternally prolong the régime which secures its domination and enjoyment: it considers, therefore, its own system as natural. Its nature becomes Nature itself. It does not see beyond its own interests, and it confounds the laws of its own conservation with those of the universe. It suppresses history – which only exists by changes – and invents a physical theory of society, which theory seeks to persuade us that inequality between men socially is as eternal and necessary as that between the organs of the body. The laws of Nature are not slighted with impunity, therefore the system of the exploitation of man by man is, according to the exploiters, a law of Nature. Every revolt against it is consequently madness or a material impossibility.

To these interested sophisms the Marxian conception opposes the true history of humanity. It demonstrates the fact of the perpetual changes that occur and have occurred in forms of production and appropriation.

Human society is a particular case in universal evolution. Nothing is eternal and unchangeable. Everything is variable. By showing that the struggle of the classes is at the base of history, Marxism unveils the historical mechanism and shows that every given social form is entirely relative, entirely conditional.

Classes and systems succeed each other and differ from each other. Thus all objections drawn – by the hair – from that much invoked “human nature” are destroyed. Marxism does not recognise man in abstracto. It knows only the owner of the slave, the feudal lord, the capitalist, the proletarian, and other “historic categories”. It replaces the vague and confused by that which is concrete and clear, and abandons generalities to the psychologists, philosophers, and metaphysicians.

Better still – by analysing scientifically the capitalist system, the Marxian shows not only that Socialist society is possible, but also that it is necessary. Collective organisation of labour is possible because it exists. It is present in the factory, in the mines, in the great stores, in the great financial establishments. It circles the world by railway and ploughs the ocean in Dreadnoughts. Individual exploitation is in flagrant contradiction with this collective organisation. From this come crises – catastrophes which demonstrate more and more that the capitalist system is becoming impossible. Soon it will be no longer for us to show the possibility of Socialism. It will be the task of the partisans of the present tottering system to prove the possibility of its continuation by any normal and progressive development.

As to the selfishness of individuals and of classes, not only does Marxism not deny it, but it utilises it to organise the proletarians into a class party, preoccupied above all with its interests, which, happily, are in complete accord with those of the social organism and of true civilisation.

There remains the third objection – the third pretended impossibility of Socialism – the resistance of those who possess. The Marxian conception is easily victorious. Socialism becomes possible just in the same degree as great capital absorbs smaller capitals, and production on a great scale supersedes small-scale production. Socialists have not to expropriate the owners – they will only expropriate the expropriators. They will restore to society the property which has been stolen from society. They do not fight private ownership of objects of immediate consumption. They struggle against capitalist property, against the oligarchy of property – the monopoly of the means of production.

The possibility – nay, more, the inevitable historic necessity – of Socialism springs thus from the play of economic forces. The organisation of the working class and the conquest of political power by this class indicate the first stages on the route to be followed.

(Ch. Rappoport in Le Socialisme. Translated for the Socialist Standard.)

Editorial: A Call To Arms. (1913)

Editorial from the March 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist is a confirmed optimist. His optimism is the natural outcome of his conviction of the soundness of his principles and his faith in his class. Pessimism can only come from doubt of one or the other, or both, therefore pessimism is not permissible in a Socialist, and where it shows its dour visage, calls aloud for attention to the victim’s dietary, either of the mind or the stomach.

But though the Socialist's confidence that the future is with him, reduces pessimism to a symptom of ill health, even the healthy, vigorous revolutionary may become impatient without suspecting himself of being out of sorts.

And when one thinks of the attitude of mind of the working class as a class toward our movement, of the apathy with which they receive our message, of the dull forbearance with which they accept the contemptious husks that the master class throw to them, it is small wonder that the enlightened worker sometimes grows impatient at the slowness of the pace, and curses the inertia of the proletarian mass in deep, broad and bitter terms.

Of course the Socialist knows that industrial evolution will make the working class revolutionary; but he has been used to regard himself and his Socialist principles—revolutionary products of that same industrial evolution—as the instrument through which it works, and it is here that the impatience and disappointment is bred. It is easy enough to find acceptance of our message wherever our means enable us to deliver it. Our arguments are too powerful to be withstood ; our reasoning is too close to be denied. But, after all, what difference is there between he who apathetically admits the correctness of our position and that other who passively differs from us?

Socialism does not thrive on inactivity. The passive assenter is a corpse in this act, and Socialism can only be brought in by live men and women. It is not passive agreement that is wanted, but fighters—organised workers. It is possible to carry on our propaganda without money, but without workers never.

While it may be doubted whether the apathetic believer in our principles whom this call to arms might influence is worth having at all, it might be pointed out for the edification of those upon whom the fact has never been thoroughly impressed, how completely essential to working-class emancipation is the instrument of a strong working-class political organisation. Those who assent to our position, even though the extent of their support is listening to us until the collection bag heaves in sight, concede, of course, that it is necessary to capture the political machine, through which the powers of coercion are organised, nourished and controlled, in order to disarm the master class, as the preliminary to divesting them of their privileges.

The capture of this political machine is not to be the work of a moment. It must be captured by siege, not carried by storm. Essential as organisation would be for the last method, if that were at all possible, it is doubly so for the slow tedium of the first. For where the position has to be fought for inch by inch, where the Parliamentary machine has to be captured seat by seat, the very perfection of organisation is needed to synchronise action, to sustain the attack, to guard against treachery, and to secure a sound foundation for our feet to rest upon.

The working class must proceed to its emancipation as a class. Individual acts and individual effort can never throw off the capitalist oppressor. Just as, hereafter, the individual must in all public matters be sunk in the community, so, in the fight for that hereafter, the individual must be lost within the class. Every step must be taken as a class; every battle must be fought on class lines; every activity, no matter whether on the industrial field or in the political arena, must be carried through as part of the class plan of action. What does this mean? What can it mean but organisation —organisation on the industrial field—organisation on the political field ?

The unity of aim which is so essential to the successful assault of the capitalist citadel can only be secured by setting up the fundamental principles appertaining to the cause, and founding thereon, with rocklike rigidity, the organisation for each sphere of activity. The basis then is provided for united action. The principles enshrined represent the class thought, the class intelligence, the class predominance over the individual. Each one, in joining the organisation, lays his individuality on the altar of those principles, and becomes a link in the armour, an atom in the whole machine.

Just as, without those principles there can be no sound organisation, because there can be no bond of union, so without organisation there can be no unity because there can be no control. Organisation upon basic principles is the instrument which takes the power away from the individual and vests it in the mass. When the individual joins such an organisation he surrenders himself to the organisation, to be tested and tried and controlled by the principles of that organisation.

Such a political organisation is vitally necessary to the successful prosecution of the working-class struggle for emancipation so long as it is true that that emancipation must be sought in the political field, because only through it can the working class control its own political actions, only through it can the class prevent itself from drifting, only through it can the class become superior to the individual, only through it can the class secure itself against the treachery of such as might not be able to withstand the offers of the capitalist enemy.

The importance, the prime necessity, of the working-class political organisation, then, must be admitted by all those who agree that the workers must win their emancipation through the capture of the political machinery. In the face of this what is the position of the person who, while agreeing with the principles of the Socialist Party, fails to become organised therein ? He is one failing in his duty to hie class, for he is one who refuses to make himself amenable, on the political plane, to the class conscious proletariat. He is a menace, therefore, to the principles he agrees with, and to the class he belongs to.

There is a different attitude of mind, however, to which we must now address ourselves—the attitude of mind of the unbeliever, the sceptic, the man who does not think it can be done, or does not think it is worth while.

This is the attitude of the mental loafers, the people who are too lazy to think for themselves, or to examine the plain, simple facts which we unceasingly present in these columns and from our platforms.

And what are these facts? The hard, cheerless lot of those who produce the wealth, and the life of luxurious ease of those who produce nothing. The growing productiveness of labour and the increasing poverty and insecurity of the labourer. Thousands starving because too much wealth exists — because they have filled the warehouses and glutted the markets, and are not wanted in the workshops and factories.

Strange invertions of the natural order of things, one would think. Yet they seem to have no significance to millions upon millions who should be the first to demand their meaning.

It would almost seem as if there is no manhood left in the vast bulk of the working class of the world yet it is little more than forty years since the deathless effort of the workingmen of Paris. We know, of course, that the working class still have within them the capacity to repeat that effort. The evil is not there, in the shirking of danger, but in the indolent acceptance of the status quo, and the cynical disregard of the facts of working-class existence.

It is always harder to take up such a fight as the workers to-day have before them, just as in ordinary warfare it is harder to march than to fight. The excitement of the direct attack better fits our animal spirits than the weary labour of outflanking. Yet, though all our activities in the struggle can be translated into no more attractive term than the humdrum word “work,” the battle is none the less real, none the less trying, none the less necessary, and none the less worthy of the highest in our manhood.

What workingman or woman of any spirit can think without shame of the position of the workers under the present system. Cut off from all the means of life; doomed to toil unceasingly in sordid and filthy surroundings for no higher end than to heap up wealth for idlers; constrained to crawl and cringe and fawn and lickspittle before those who cannot even produce their own livelihood, theirs is indeed a position to be hotly blushed for. Nevertheless there are those, even among the working class, who assert that the workers have not the capability to order things more to their advantage.

The idea is shameful. It is an insult, not only to our class, but to human intelligence. The wealth at present produced is sufficient to give comfort and even a degree of luxury to every member of the community. The whole of that wealth is produced by the working class. We are asked to believe that the working class intelligence is not capable of solving the simple problem of distributing that wealth among the people who produce it.

We say it is a lie; the solution is ridiculously easy. We have simply to sweep away those who stand between us and all that is good under the sun. We have to take away from them all the sources of wealth and all the means of producing wealth, and to use them for the satisfaction of our own needs. Who gave the world into the hands of these idlers, pray ?

To the work of throwing down the barriers which the masters have set up between our class and the world, of setting humanity free to produce what humanity needs without let or hindrance, we solemnly call all working people.

To Arms! The World for the Workers!

Mixed Media: The Master and Margarita (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Simon McBurney directed the Complicite Theatre Company in a ‘phantastic’ dramatisation of the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov at the Barbican in London recently.

Bulgakov was writing in the USSR in the 1920-30s when Stalin ruthlessly pursued state capitalist industrialisation. Although Stalin personally liked the works of Bulgakov, the author faced prohibitions of his plays by Glavrepertcom (censorship committee) for concerning himself with the fate of intellectuals and Tsarists in the revolution and civil war. Bulgakov politically was a ‘liberal conservative monarchist.’

The Master and Margarita is a fantasy and political satire on Soviet society under Stalin and critiques the literary establishment, highlighting the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness and paranoia in Stalinist Russia. Bulgakov looks at the relation of the individual artist to the state, censorship (‘manuscripts don’t burn’), the power of love, good and evil and human frailty. The novel was not published until 1966. Bulgakov was inspired by the play, Faust, by Goethe, the opera, The Damnation of Faust, by Berlioz, and his ‘Margarita’ is modelled after Goethe’s heroine, ‘Gretchen’ in Faust. In his ‘Confessions’ for Jenny and Laura Marx of 1865, Marx lists Goethe and Gretchen as his favourite poet and heroine.

Bulgakov has ‘Professor Woland’ (Lucifer) with his demonic two-legged black cat ‘Behemoth’ (Biblical monster in Job 40:15) visit Moscow where he exposes greed, bourgeois behaviour and the superficial vanities of modern life. Bulgakov portrays Satan’s Spring Ball where the notorious in human history such as Caligula are gathered with ‘the kings, dukes, chevaliers, procuresses, jailers, executioners, informers, traitors, and spies.’ In 1935 Bulgakov attended the Spring Ball at the US Ambassadors home in Moscow along with senior Bolsheviks such as Bukharin. The Master and Margarita was the inspiration for the Rolling Stones song, Sympathy for the Devil, and Salman Rushdie has credited the ‘magical realism’ of the novel as an inspiration for The Satanic Verses.

Bulgakov has a second plot involving the trial of ‘Yeshua Ha-Notsri’ (Jesus of the Nazarene sect) in ‘Yershalayim’ (Jerusalem) before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Bulgakov was inspired by the parable of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Bulgakov focuses on Pilate’s words as he washes his hands in Matthew 27:24: ‘I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person,’ and the debate between Jesus (‘wanderer and mad philosopher’) and Pilate is drawn from Pilate’s question in John 18:38: ‘And what is truth?’ This Christian theme is explicit in The Master and Margarita with Pilate’s spiritual need for Jesus spelled out clearly at the conclusion of the play.

Steve Clayton

Action Replay: The City and the World (2013)

Mahmood al-Zarooni

The Action Replay column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of April, racehorse trainer Mahmood al-Zarooni was banned for eight years after admitting that he had injected anabolic steroids into horses in his charge. This has been claimed to be the biggest doping scandal in the history of horse racing, but it also tells us a lot about the general social setting of sport.

Zarooni worked for Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates. Godolphin, the sheik’s enormous racing and breeding concern, has enjoyed great success in winning top races. But it’s not just a matter of an expensive hobby or a money-making enterprise. Dubai presents itself as a modern city, built on ‘a foundation of innovation and uninhibited achievement.’ And ‘Godolphin, in encapsulating those same values, exemplifies Dubai and plays a meaningful role in representing the Emirate to the world’ (godolphin.com/about-us/about-godolphin/). So it is a gigantic PR exercise, one that could do without the nasty associations of this scandal. Just as it could do without publicity about the impoverished immigrants who build the skyscrapers and work as domestic servants to the Maktoums and their relations.

The doping scandal also reveals a great deal about how the globalisation of production and distribution under modern capitalism has affected sport. Most Godolphin horses are trained in Newmarket, but many of them spend the winter back in Dubai, enjoying the warmer climate there. This, however, may have been the source of Zarooni’s problems, since anabolic steroids are allowed to be used in Dubai, as long as they are no longer in a horse’s system by the time it races. In the UK, though, they are prohibited completely. This sort of thing has created problems in the past – in 2009 even one of the queen’s horses was found to have raced with a drug (not steroids) that had not cleared its system in time.

Global capitalism sometimes has problems with differing regulations in different countries, so truly global corporations have to make sure that they fit in with whatever rules apply where they want to manufacture or trade. Ah, the trials of being a multinational company . . . 

Paul Bennett

Greasy Pole: Not Another Maggie Thatcher? (2013)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the Iron Lady dissolved into ashes, something similar began to happen to her reputation, so lovingly nurtured, for strength, courage, honesty and humanity in her promotion of Britishness against any threats from without and within. First there were the biographies, in particular Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography by ex-Sunday Telegraph editor Charles Moore, the publication of which was always intended to be delayed until after her death. This was as she had ordered: the co-operation Moore received was unusually generous on condition that her wishes in this were obeyed (in fact he was – still is – too ardent an admirer of hers to even dream of going against her wishes).

Then there was the TV programme Young Margaret: Love, Life And Letters, to which Moore was an important contributor, if an apparently embarrassed one. This revealed a rather different character with a talent for cynical manipulation when it came to human relationships. For example among a succession of unsuspecting man friends she at first cultivated a relationship with one she described as displaying ‘…the kind of naivety only a Scotsman can have’ but who owned a fair bit of land and profitable shares in industry. When Margaret had more promising prospects in sight, the farmer was briskly passed on to her sister Muriel who was thus made (we believe) happy ever after.

Such discriminatory skills were also applied in the matter of some other holidaymakers in Madeira who are derided as ‘…rather tatty tourists, Jews and novo rich.’ And rich among the examples of cold, calculating tactics is her view of her father, Alf Roberts the grocer from Grantham, once credited, as she worked her way up to the top of the Greasy Pole, as an enduring, invaluable example of parental guidance for a supremely ambitious daughter. After her mother died Thatcher had Alf move in with her but this did not yield the kind of advantages she had planned: ‘He is eating the most enormous meals and doing absolutely nothing except reading’ she complained to Muriel, telling her she intended to ‘shunt Pop off … will this be all right with you? Otherwise he will just hang on and on and not take any hints.’ A month or so afterwards Alf was writing to Muriel that he never heard anything from Margaret: ‘in fact I don’t think I know their new phone number.’ And then, unremarked, he died.

Tory MP

A spin-off of the post-mortem reverence for Thatcher was the requirement that any aspirant successor would have to be, apart from female, as scabrous as the Lady herself. It seemed a promising time for the emergence of Liz Truss, MP for South West Norfolk and recently promoted Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education. Although new to the game of Westminster politics – she was first elected in 2010 – she quickly attracted some notice, for example the assessment of her boss Michael Gove that she was ‘a minister to watch,’ and then the calculated flattery of Labour MP Sharon Hodgson that she had the ‘common touch of the Iron Lady about her …she may take it as a compliment.’ Truss could describe her parents as ‘to the left of Labour.’ As a child she was taken by her mother to CND demonstrations and one of her school essays was an anticipatory piece on the fall of Margaret Thatcher. At Oxford she joined the LibDems, making something of a name for herself with an anti-monarchist speech at their 1994 conference. It was a couple of years later that she found her true place in the Conservative Party and, after the usual couple of abortive efforts, as the party’s parliamentary candidate for South West Norfolk, where at her first election in 2010 she had a solid majority of over 13,000.

Reform

She had been a Deputy Director of Reform, a ‘think tank’ which calls itself independent and non-political but which was founded by a Tory MP and a former head of the political section of the Conservative Research Department. Its declared aim is to promote what it calls a ‘better way’ for public services and economic success through private industry and market de-regulation. It also works for the abolition of ‘pensioner gimmicks’ such as free TV licensing and the winter fuel payment. So when Truss was promoted to Gove’s team she was well placed to implement Reform’s ideas on ’higher standards’ in schools. For anyone with any doubts on the issue there was her paper Britannia Unchained which denounced British workers as ‘…among the worst idlers in the world’ with too many of them who ‘…prefer a lie-in to hard work’. A ’key plank’ in her intentions for nurseries is to work the staff harder by increasing their allocation of two-year-olds from four to six. At the same time she has been free with strictures on those workers because when she had inspected nurseries here ‘I have seen too many chaotic settings where children are running around. There’s no sense of purpose’.. Among the response to these comments, from parents as well as experienced child-care practitioners, the arguments against stricter discipline for children were flavoured with reminders that the level of morale in nurseries would be associated with low wages, poor working conditions and a lack of expectations for the future.

Affair

And it must be said that Truss has not always been so strict in applying sound principles to her own behaviour. After her adoption as the candidate for South West Norfolk there was a move to reverse the decision when it became known that some years before she had had an affair with Mark Field, the Tory MP for Westminster. Some of the local Tories, dubbed The Turnip Taliban, led by former High Sheriff of Norfolk, Sir Jeremy Bagge, argued that Truss was unsuitable as their candidate because she had chosen to conceal the matter, leaving them to find out through a Sunday newspaper article. In the event, the rebellion failed and Truss continued on her way to emerge as a hopeful to be the new Iron Lady – who might in fact have taught her of the necessity in politics to be ready always to suppress the truth while energetically promoting falsehoods.

Ivan

Editorial: Capitalism's Dark Hour. (1920)

Editorial from the May 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

We used to hear much more than we do now about the awful prospects that awaited the peoples of the world in the event of their deciding to substitute Socialism for capitalism. Not only were we to wade to our goal through a sea of blood, but we were to find, when we reached our Land of Promise, that instead of being a land flowing with milk and honey, it was a stoney and sterile desert. Famine and rape would stalk the land; anarchy and chaos would overwhelm humanity; rain and destruction would embrace all—all except the capitalists, departed per Cooks, with their capital (per Pickford) to “Wangaloo, in unpacific seas.”

Talk of that kind is not very fashionable just now—not that Socialism is any more attractive to those who used to indulge in such vapourings, but they are rather afraid to throw stones for very obvious reasons.

However, if our opponents dare not talk of such things that is no reason why we should be deterred, while on the other hand there are good reasons for reminding our fellow wage slaves of the hypocritical taunts that our capitalist enemies have not the impudence to use just at present.

We are moved to these remarks by the awful spectacle of human misery which capitalism in her very prime offers to our eyes. For some days there has appeared in orthodox Press a most agonising appeal for funds to relieve the starving multitudes of what are now called the famine areas of Europe. In this appeal the Statement is made that FIVE MILLION children are in danger of starvation, and we read this tragic announcement:

  “News is just to hand that only those children between three and five can be helped; the mites under three must be abandoned to starvation, for there will not be enough food to go round if these are included.” 

and it is commented, “It has been necessary deliberately to select which children shall be saved and which must be left to die.”

Those who have with such cool effrontery declared that Socialism could not feed her populations have here something to think about. The present system, with all its wonderfully fertile means of production, is helpless to prevent catastrophes of such dimensions of horror as no act of nature within human knowledge has ever equalled—nay, it is not merely that it is unable to prevent them: it produces them.

How utterly helpless the system is to cope with its own products is vividly shown by two other statements in the heart-rending appeal. “Our docks are choked with food," it says. “Food is ready, clothing is ready.” That is the first statement. “I am convinced that Central Europe is in danger of a famine that may involve all nations in a common ruin,” Dr. Arthur Guttery is reported to have stated. So, though there are ample means at hand to save these starving people, and though their misery is the concern of all other nations inasmuch as it is a standing menace of disaster, even to ruin, to all other nations, because those means are the property of the few instead of being the property of society, nothing can be done. Here the accumulated stocks of mutton cause the Government embarrassment, so that they are compelled to lower the price in order to induce people to eat more freely of it; there men, women and children are dying in thousands, and threatening to scourge the world with epidemic, for want of that very surplus mutton—yet this accursed system has no other solution to the problem than private charity, which really is no solution at all.

There is another side to the question which should disturb the complacency of those who regard themselves as so detached from this great tragedy as to be not greatly concerned. Only three short years ago it needed but a slight turning of the fortunes of war to have brought this awful calamity upon the mothers and fathers and children of this land. And more, it may yet be the experience of those now living in this country to find their food supply cut off by foreign powers. A comparatively weak naval force, operating in the wide ocean spaces, could do it, and capitalism shows itself capable, in the struggle for markets, of condemning rival nations to death.

Letter: Socialist Enclave (1979)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have read the last 12 copies or so of the Socialist Standard and nearly all your pamphlets, and am now quite convinced that you are the only "true" Socialist Party in that your primary concern is for the overthrow of capitalism (we’ve waited hundreds of years for that one) and class society generally (we’ve waited thirty thousand years for that one!).

However, my question is connected with that latter “overthrow". The SPGB believes in the ballot method, which is after all a sure test of the democracy involved. However, it is highly unlikely that all countries will arise one morning and breathe in the fresh air of knowledge and calmly (but surely) pen their votes for the social change. One country would have to begin the process (or a bunch of countries) and thus would still be faced with a surrounding majority of capitalist others. Just as capitalism arose as an enclave within feudal society, so socialism would arise as an enclave within capitalism, EXCEPT what would determine its survival or even its influence upon the other countries?

Socialism can exist only on a worldwide basis, thus if I and the vast majority of the British population voted for the SPGB you may find yourselves becoming another bunch of politicians in a world in which the social structure is capable of withstanding great attempts at Socialist "enclaves" (as I mentioned earlier). This Socialist "enclave" question is, I believe, the greatest to face socialists (greatest problem at answering, that is) since it brings to mind the problems of a world slowly changing to Socialism (if at all) and, assuming this, then in what manner?

Dan Vogel

Reply:

Although we can use our knowledge about former social revolutions to investigate the process of social change, it is important that we keep clear in our minds the essential difference between each of these revolutions.

In particular, the revolution for socialism will be society’s first majority revolution—the first by the people of the world in their own interest. As such, there is no reason to accept that it will exactly follow the same lines as previous revolutions—for example that from feudalism to capitalism.

So we should not automatically assume that it is necessary for socialist “enclaves” to exist among the ruins of capitalism. The movement for socialism is now one of ideas and on that score all the developed world is pretty well at the same stage: workers in America. Russia, Europe, Australia. Japan and so on have the same ideas about capitalism and about human society in general.

In the other countries they are catching up fast; with the development of industry in the newly “independent" countries the people there will have ideas indistinguishable from those of workers where the development happened earlier.

Ideas do not stand still. For example, in the last thirty years we have seen important changes in attitude towards marriage, the family, education, difference in skin colour. These changes—which have happened worldwide—are the process of the working class feeling their way towards the conclusion that a fundamental social change is the only way to harmonise relationships within society.

In other words, there is every reason to think that the socialist revolution will be, to all intents and purposes, simultaneous throughout the world. For a time it may gather greater momentum in one country than in another, but this will quickly adjust itself. As socialism becomes a more possible reality there will be a rush toward it, rather than a hanging back. Speed the day!

Editors

The Soviet Union — in Facts and Figures (1958)

Book Review from the July 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

With a very glossy cover and 215 pages this book (published by Soviet News) is ludicrously cheap at 5s. It contains many facts and figures — and some fiction.

Among the facts are: the Soviet Union is the largest country in the world; the population is now 200,200,000, and the capital is Moscow, with 4,839,000 inhabitants. Whilst in the fiction department we are told that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a “Socialist Revolution”; that “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a socialist state of workers and peasants”; and that all power in the U.S.S.R. belongs to the working people; and that:—

  “The economic foundation of the U.S.S.R. is the Socialist system of economy and the Socialist ownership of the instruments and means of production.”—Article 4, Constitution of the U.S.S.R.'

But, The Soviet Union, In Facts and Figures, gives its readers ample evidence of the non-Socialist character of Soviet society. Ideas, attitudes and many institutions familiar to us in Western Europe and in America are also found in Soviet Russia, and are mentioned with pride in this book. Mention is made of the Armed Forces of the State “to defend the Soviet Union’s freedom, independence and security . . .” (p. 157). A large section of the book is given over to the “National Economy" — to the Five-year plans for economic development, capital investment, retail trading, foreign trade with other countries, the U.S.S.R. Chamber of Commerce, and the like. 

Important sections on the Soviet monetary system, financial agencies, state budget, budget revenue (including profits in the national economy, taxes, etc.) and information on Soviet banks and credit systems, should be of interest to all readers of this journal.

Much useful information is given on the so-called trade unions of Russia; on the only legal political party— the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; on public education and scientific development; on literature and art; and on music, the cinema, the theatre and sport. There is also a brief survey of religious organisations, and in the section on the constitutional position of these religious organisations we are told that “The only instances when the Soviet State prohibits the formation of a religious body is if its doctrines or rites are cruel or a menace to society (for example, sects that preach self-torture. sects that call for a struggle against all forms of government, and so forth).” So the Canadian Dukhobors. who are returning to Russia after years of exile from their native land, had better look out!

Although far from telling the whole story, or giving all the facts and figures about the Soviet Union, this book can be recommended, especially to Socialists who are able to read between the lines; and who whilst recognising the great technical advances that have taken place in Russia, do not fall for the “Socialism in Russia” line of Communist mythology!

The Soviet Union In Fact and Figures tells us of a great industrial state, not unlike other great industrial states: and as such is quite a good 5s. worth.

Peter E. Newell

The Supermarkets (1958)

From the July 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Take a basket, please,” said a smartly overalled young lady assistant as Writer walked into a supermarket for the first (and last) time in his life. How well lit the place was and what a marvellous display of colour! Could the magician’s cave of jewels seem more desirable to Aladdin than this wonderland of good things did to the Writer? Innumerable packets of powdered soup (just add boiling water); tins of ham (no bones with it, just slice it with the knife); meat gravy (just ready to be poured out of the bottle). Even the tinned carrots looked nearly as luscious as ripe peaches, or so the picture indicated. Rich, creamy custard powder and scrumptious cake-mixes (just add tap-water). Savoury cheese wrapped in cellophane already sliced (just remove the wrapper). Food in glass pots simply pleading to be eaten without even water being required, food in transparent bags and in beautiful packets. Could heaven itself be more beckoning? One of these and one of those—into the basket with them. And certainly some of these other ones and some of those, too. Quick, those over there are good, and these simply can’t be left behind. What bliss! And then, finally* the cashier. How much? £3 10s.? Phew! The Writer staggered out with his purchases, although he went in only intending to look around.

Food for thought

But the supermarket also provides food for thought and the question arises as to why the housewife prefers to shop mere rather than in the local stores nearer her own home. In shopping at the local store, when her turn to be served comes and she is confronted by a shop-assistant, she has to have her order ready. This means spending time considering what is needed, and if she is likely to be flustered or to forget some of the items when it is her turn to be served, she will have to write out a list. With more married women going out to work, with the increasing complexity of life, and the rising tempo of commercialised distractions as the present system of society develops, it is no wonder that the shopper prefers a supermarket—just walking around choosing at will. According to expert reports this impulse buying has grown every year for the past two decades and has coincided with the growth of self-service shopping. But perhaps the term “choosing at will” is not quite correct, in view of the deep trickery which is commonly practised. On May 18th, 1956, The New York Times printed a remarkable interview with Gerald Stahl, executive vice- president of the Package Design Council. He stated: "Psychiatrists say that people have so much to choose from that they want help—they will like the package that hypnotizes them into picking it” He urged food packers to put more hypnosis into their package designing, so that the housewife will stick out her hand for it rather than one of many rivals.

Mr. Stahl has found that it takes the average woman exactly twenty seconds to cover an aisle in a supermarket if she doesn't tarry; so a good package design should hypnotize the woman like a flashlight waved in front of her eyes. Some colours, such as red and yellow, are helpful in creating hypnotic effects. To get the woman to reach and get the package in her hands, designers, he explained, are now using “symbols that have a dreamlike quality.” To cite examples of dreamlike quality, he mentioned the mouth-watering frosted cakes that decorate the packages of cake mixes, sizzling steaks, mushrooms frying in butter. The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat. Such illustrations make the woman’s imagination leap ahead to the end product.

The Colour Research Institute, which specialises in designing deep-impact packages, won’t even send a package out into the field for testing until it has been given ocular or eye-movement tests to show how the consumer’s eye will travel over the package on the shelf. This is a gauge of the attention-holding power of the design.

According to Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, the Coca-Cola Company made an interesting psychological discovery that customers who paused to refresh themselves at a soft drink counter ended by spending substantially more. In a test where they offered customers free drinks, about 80 per cent, accepted the Cokes, and spent about a £1 more than the average customer. After coming out from work, the prospective shopper needs to relax and in this mood is fair game to any firm with all the know-how of tricks suggested by the psychologist. One can well understand that the working-class housewife with a background of forced economy and trying to make both ends meet can be “caught” by a little extravagance. An American supermarket found that putting a pat of butter on top of each of its better steaks caused sales to soar 15 per cent.

In a trance until pay time

A psychological researcher in America, James Vicary, became curious to know why there had been such a rise in supermarket sales. His suspicion was that perhaps the housewives underwent an increase in tension when confronted with so many possibilities that they were forced into making quick purchases. He set out to find if this was true. He hid a motion-picture camera to record the eye-blink rate of women as they shopped. How fast a person blinks their eyes is supposed to be a good index of the state of his inner tension. The average person, according to Mr. Vicary, normally blinks his eyes about thirty-two times a minute. If he is tense he blinks them more frequently, under extreme tension up to fifty or sixty times a minute. If he is notably relaxed on the other hand his eye-blink rate may drop to a subnormal twenty or less.

Mr. Vicary set up his cameras and started following the ladies as they entered the store. The results were startling, even to him. Their eye-blink rate, instead of going up to indicate mounting tension, went down and down, to a very subnormal fourteen blinks a minute. The ladies fell into what Mr. Vicary calls a hypnoidal trance, a light kind of trance that, he explains, is the first stage of hypnosis. Mr. Vicary has decided that the main cause of the trance is that the supermarket is packed with products that in former years would have been items that only kings and queens could afford, and here in this fairyland they were available.

These havens of plate-glass and chrome, hygiene and bright lights, the brilliant presentation of merchandise involving the most up-to-date tricks of salesmanship, these things, which together add up to the supermarket—the refuge of the working-class housewife. The very epitome of capitalist society itself seems expressed in the jungle of the supermarket.

Frank Offord

Outside Right (2019)

Book Review from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know’. By George Hawley (Oxford University Press £10.99)

The label Alternative Right (now usually shortened to Alt-Right) was coined in 2008. It refers to a ‘far-right radical movement’ in the US, which has had some impact but is possibly now in decline, plagued by infighting. Here George Hawley discusses its origins, history and influences, and its connections to other political viewpoints.

As a movement rather than an actual party or organisation, the Alt-Right consists of a range of views, but the obnoxious core beliefs of its supporters can be described fairly simply. The oft-cited Fourteen Words are: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’, while the website of the National Policy Institute, an Alt-Right think tank, describes it as ‘dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world’. The Alt-Right is explicitly racist, seeing race as a biological category, and advocating white identity politics and a white ethnostate; it wishes to end all non-white immigration to the US. It is anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, and often misogynistic.  Some of its supporters are neo-Nazis, but by no means all. It is not populist, as it holds in contempt many who are not part of the elite, calling them ‘norms’ and viewing them as not ‘racially aware’.

The US political system, together with the vast sums spent by the two main parties, means that the Alt-Right has had little electoral success. It is mainly an online movement, setting up its own websites, making great use of social media, trolling people with other ideas and seeking to influence others. It has been open to doxing, where the real-world identities of anonymous Alt-Right bloggers and contributors are revealed by opponents, which often causes problems for them. Its informal nature means it is impossible to say how many supporters or sympathisers it has, though its core advocates are fortunately fairly few in number.

The main example of Alt-Right activism that was not online was the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. This became very violent, with many protesting in opposition, and one counter-protester was killed when a car was driven into a group of them. The rally clearly harmed the Alt-Right’s reputation, though Donald Trump claimed that both sides shared responsibility for what happened.

Hawley gives a fairly thorough account of the various influences on the Alt-Right, their links to European organisations and their differences from mainstream conservatives. However, what the book lacks is much description and analysis of their ideas and aims. Presumably this is because, as he says, they do not ‘offer a coherent or well-developed set of policy proposals’. But some more discussion of the views of its main figures, beyond the brief descriptions given, would have been helpful.

Paul Bennett

Political Notes: Abandon-ships! (1981)

The  Political Notes Column from the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abandon-ships!

Many muffins must have been choked over, in the tea shoppes of places like Tunbridge Wells, at the news that a Tory government may be thinking of scuttling the Royal Navy. In such places there is a perceptible effort to get time, if not to stand still, at least to be reined in. Retired admirals perambulate the streets in hazy dreams of those days of the great, grey battleships looming out of the Channel mists, of royal reviews of line after line of floating fire-power at Spithead or Scapa Flow.

Such people—although they would rather die among the muffins than admit it—have a marked affinity to Labour lefties. Both types vote for their party in the belief that it will not face up to the realities of capitalism. The only difference between them is in the differing realities that they believe will be evaded. And both undergo a nasty shock, when their delusions are blown aside.

Tory governments have done a lot of this blowing. Since they came back to power in 1951, they have not shown any great reluctance to move with the times. Under their rule British capitalism, as it had to, has pulled in its horns. The old British Empire has been dismantled, the armed forces reduced in keeping with the new, restricted influence in world affairs. Eden’s lunatic adventure into Suez in 1956 was a hiccup in this process, soon put right by the saner, smoother MacMillan who worked hard to get the Tories to accept what he saw was inevitable.

Now there is very little left, except for the dreams in Tunbridge Wells—and the Royal Navy, which once expressed in its flags, its guns and its vast ships the world wide expansion of British capitalism, has very little left too. There is no reason for a Tory government not to face this fact. It would be near madness for them, at a time of recession, to spend a lot of money on a navy for which the British capitalist class has little use, simply to placate some of its wilder supporters—in Tunbridge Wells or the Bacup working men’s club.


Mitterrand’s soft ‘socialism’

Francois Mitterrand, the new president of France, is treading a tightrope at the moment, trying on the one hand to retain his popularity with French workers by offering them sops such as increased minimum wages and security benefits, and on the other hand to remain respectable to the French Establishment.

Perhaps Prince Charles will have given him a few tips on how to do that when he went to see him recently. Certainly, his announcement that he will fully maintain France’s arsenal of nuclear weapons for the defence of French property will have reassured a number of people with property interests there.

This opportunist posing is not quite as curious as the headline which appeared in the Sunday Times on 24 May: “Mitterrand softens his socialism to win electors’’. Socialism means the abolition of all property and profit, and the planning of production for use on the basis of common ownership. It is not by its very nature something which can be “softened”, watered down or dressed up to “win electors”.

It is a harmonious social system which would solve the world’s present social problems. Mitterrand stressed right from the start of his campaign that he wishes to modify the present system, not end it. It can only be ended when the majority reject the inflated promises of all capitalist politicians, regardless of their labels. Do not trust anything, including this journal. We can only suggest the cause of our problems to you. The solution lies with us all. The need is to organise democratically, without leaders or promises.


No choice

An awful lot of venom is currently being excited, and expressed, in what is politely known as political debate. The unemployed—or rather those of them restless enough to demonstrate about their plight—shriek their loathing of Margaret Thatcher. To the Tories and to not a few Labour supporters—Tony Benn is a wild eyed fanatic who wants to legislate some nameless dreads into our lives. All of this is based on the theory that political leaders can initiate the crises of capitalism. If that theory were valid, capitalism’s history would be different, for if leaders can initiate a crisis they can just as easily terminate it. Yet this they never seem able to do.

Then again why is it that this turbulent, endless search for the perfect leader — or the perfect combination of them — never succeeds, so that there is always a clutch of the wretched people being reviled. spat upon, bombarded with stale eggs? Why is there always some threat, potential or actual, to set back the programmes for peace and plenty? There can be only one consistent and satisfactory answer. Political leaders do not initiate crises: they only respond to them. So it is more useful to regard their personalities in that light, as shaped by events rather than being able to shape them.

But such rational, supportable views of politics would deprive the competition between the capitalist parties of much of its excitement, a lot of which revolves around a personal dislike for the others' leaders. Except that there is an alternative to this futility—a proper understanding of the basis of capitalism and thereby of the ideas, political and religious theories, the philosophy and the morals, which spring from that basis. Such knowledge is much more exciting—because it is much more powerful—than parading the streets shouting for the demise of some leader or other. It is knowledge to change more than leaders—it will abolish them, and change society itself.

Hunger marching in the 1930s (1981)

Hunger Marching in Britain, 1934.

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was an awesome predictability about the comparisons drawn between that People’s March for Jobs in May and the Jarrow Crusade in 1936. Awesome because the comparisons were blind to an important fact: this is a sick society and its history is not so much repeated as regurgitated.

The 1981 March, much publicised, had some impressive sponsors—like Harold Wilson, whose second government saw unemployment begin to rise to its present level and who was always inveighing against “overmanning” in industry and was fond of referring to redundancies as “shake-outs”. Like garrulous Brian Clough, who doesn’t mind sacking footballers if they don’t play up to standard. Like compulsive protester Peter Main. Yes, it was impressive and exciting, and thoroughly predictable.

The Jarrow marchers were selected for their physical fitness: they marched in ground sheets and flat caps, fed at wayside soup kitchens, and had their boots mended at the local Co-op. One participant (Sunday Times 26/4/81) remembers it as “. .. a holiday . . . they were feeding like fighting cocks. And they got 1s 6d (9p) pocket money at a time when the Means Test Commissioners said you could keep a child on a shilling (5p) a week”.

That stark memory says a lot about conditions in the thirties. In Britain the effect of capitalism's global depression was the crumbling away of the foundations laid down in the Industrial Revolution—the coal mines, textiles, iron and steel and shipbuilding. (In 1932, 62 per cent of shipyard workers were unemployed.) Thus what had once been the boom spots of British capitalism became its Depressed Areas, where the plight of the workers was particularly wretched:

  Most of our children are suffering not so much from tuberculosis as from starvation. Seventy-five per cent of the cases admitted to the Society’s sanatorium were suffering from undernourishment. (Dr. O'Hara at the 1933 meeting of the Durham County Society for the Prevention and Cure of Consumption.)

But the government were not impressed. John Boyd Orr, who found that in 1935 30 per cent of the British population were trying to survive on a seriously deficient diet, remembered:

  Mr. Kingsley Wood, the Minister of Health, asked me to come and see him. He wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance there was no poverty in the country. (As I Recall.)

Any surprise at Kingsley Wood’s denial of something which was all to obvious should be tempered by the consideration that he was, after all, a politician—and governments had for some years been busily turning the screw on the unemployed. In 1931 an unemployed man received 85p a week, with 45p for a dependent wife and 10p for each child. “Unemployment benefit”, insisted Ramsay MacDonald, “is not a living wage; it was never meant to be that’’. MacDonald’s rare flirtation with the truth can be explained on the grounds that at the time he was arguing for a reduction in the benefits. This was introduced a few months later by MacDonald’s National Government, under an Act passed by his earlier Labour Party administration.

One result of the cuts was that many people were disqualified from receiving state benefits as of right and were left at the mercy of locally based Public Assistance Committees (PAC), whose decisions were often distinguishable only by a variation in harshness. In January 1935 there was another turn of the screw, when unemployed benefits were placed under the central control of the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB). This change led to even lower allowances than those under the PAC; Tory MP Robert Boothby summed it up: “The new administration is brutal. I can use no other word”.

But the UAB were fretting about the profligacy of the unemployed on those generous allowances. Their 1935 Report was shocked at one who, having inherited some money “. . . immediately took his whole family for an expensive seaside holiday”. One remedy for this sort of behaviour was in places called “residential instruction centres and camps” where, under the watchful repression of ex-army officers, young men were disciplined back to “employability”.

The Times (22/3/38) was ecstatic about the camps (some of its readers had been writing in to say how well this very matter was being handled in Nazi Germany):

  . . . hundreds and thousands of young men . . . do not show any disposition to bestir themselves to get themselves out of unemployment and into employment . . . there is a slackness of moral fibre and of will as well as of muscle . . . the breakdown of morale can only be made good by applying compulsion.

Strangely, no lack of moral fibre was descried—and the UAB did not fret about—the country house parties remembered by Harold Macmillan (Winds of Change) where: “There were no rules except the necessity of appearing at dinner . . .Otherwise, in a large company the groups organised themselves for golf, tennis, walking, talking or quiet reading”. Nor in the world of Tory MP Henry Channon, who had married into the Guinness family and who complained in July 1935: “I am tired of being ‘tiddly’ by night and ‘gaga’ by day: the season has lasted long enough”.

By then marches by unemployed workers had become an established routine of protest. At the spearhead was the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), led by Communist Party member Wal Hannington and widely regarded with the sort of hostility and contempt expressed for the flying pickets a few years ago. “Hannington and the revolutionary riff-raff of London” was the Daily Telegraph's (1/11/32) description. The NUWM was proscribed by the Labour Party and the TUC, was under continual police surveillance and the subject of many a worried Special Branch report.

In spite of this the NUWM organised numerous marches and protests, many of which were on the receiving end of violent repression from the blue uniformed guardians of capitalist law and docility. At the peak of the violence, in October 1932, a crowd of tens of thousands in Hyde Park was attacked by the police, who then stole—there is no other word for it—the petition brought by the marchers to London. Later NUWM demonstrations were on a lower key; in 1936 they finished an orderly march with a rally in Hyde Park, where Attlee and Bevan spoke from the same platform as Hannington. There was nothing to cause alarm, except to any workers class-conscious enough to understand what Bevan meant when he proclaimed, “This demonstration proves to the country that Labour needs a united leadership”.

But the NUWM protests, although they were bigger and more violent, they have been historically overshadowed by the Jarrow Crusade. This latter march sprang from the 1934 closure of Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow, which threw 80 per cent of the town’s workforce on the dole. Both the Labour Party and the TUC, although they now lay claim to the Crusade as part of their glorious history, condemned it at the time as a publicity stunt by Jarrow’s Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. The march was orderly; almost the loudest noise it made came from the mouth organs in the lead, until they got to London and saw King Edward VIII in the Mall. At this they forgot any indignation they might have felt about their poverty as against ruling class privilege and. said the Special Branch, “cheered lustily”.

Benignly, the Home Office agreed that, as “. . . the marchers show every sign of being orderly, it would be a good way of encouraging them and placating them” if they were to be entertained to tea at the House of Commons, where much of their misery was discussed and legislated upon. That was about all they got, and Ellen Wilkinson was scathingly rebuked by the Labour Party NEC at their Annual Conference that October. One Jarrow councillor said ". . . you have drawn a blank” but that was not entirely true. Because the marchers had not been “available for work” while they were away from Jarrow the UAB, overlooking the fact that there was no work to be available for, reduced their benefit by up to 55p a week.

Little more could be claimed for the protests than the restoration of some benefit cuts. Unemployment remained stubbornly high; Jarrow did not come back to life. Until the war in 1939 enforced a change, the UAB continued as the scourge of the unemployed. And now, nearly fifty years on. the failure is starkly illuminated: it is all happening again because we are almost back where we began, with 2½ million unemployed.

This is no accident. Wal Hannington (Unemployed Struggles 1919-36) claimed some massive demonstrations in 1931—30,000 people in Dundee, 50,000 in Glasgow, 40,000 in Hyde Park, and much more. Yet that same year the British working class voted overwhelmingly for capitalism to be run by the National Government—the very government who were imposing the cuts in dole money, the police repression of the hunger marchers and all. The total government vote at that election was over 14½ million against just over 7 million for the equally futile, equally culpable, opposition such as the Labour Party.

So capitalism was allowed to continue and now, 50 years on, there can be no optimism that the protesters would have it any different. Like the battlers of the NUWM, like the pathetic men from Jarrow, the 1981 marchers demanded the unobtainable—capitalism without its inevitable ill-effects. One of their leaflets urged: “Unemployment is a human tragedy . . . People must act now . . . Say no to unemployment. . . Demand a return to full employment”.

These ringing phrases could only have reinforced the demonstrators’ confusion, when their overwhelming need is to grasp that working class life under capitalism is tragedy, whether they are in or out of work. There is no dignity in the degrading experience of a person who sells their labour power as the only way of getting a living. It is futile for workers to say no to unemployment, for an economic recession does not happen through a mistake, because someone has not listened. And even if they—the politicians, the economists, the experts—had listened, they would still be powerless to end the recession, to put all the unemployed out of their misery of idleness into the misery of active exploitation.

There is much, much more to it. Those who protest about the effects of capitalism would do better to look for a more radical approach—or else contribute towards generations to come suffering the same sore feet, the same sore heads—and the same bitter disillusionment.

Ivan

The Shamefaced Middle-Class (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Britain today, the richest ten per cent of the population own sixty per cent of the wealth. The other nine tenths of the people share between them less than half of the wealth. And yet it is precisely those nine tenths who, not having any substantial property or unearned income, are forced to work for a living, and so to create all that wealth. These figures were quoted in the 1979 report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth.

The few who own all the factories, offices, plant and property, can therefore accumulate more and more by employing thousands of workers, while the bottom nine tenths have practically nothing but their ability to work. So about ninety per cent of the population are employees, they work for wages or salaries, and accumulate practically nothing. The wages and salaries paid to employees are generally consumed by every-day living expenses. Even high-paid managers are only getting a “living wage” if their salaries are eaten up by paying a mortgage, running a big car and so on, for these expenses are all part of their job. Only seven per cent of adults in Britain own shares, and more than eighty per cent of privately owned shares are held by one thousandth of the population. (See The Wealthy, CIS Report, 85p.) The Supplementary Benefits Commission has found that nearly three in five unemployed people have no money at all after one month out of work.

Who are the working class?
What is class? Some try to define it subjectively, saying that it is “up to the individual" to try to say what class they think they are in, if any. This produces chaos: Gallup polls in 1953 showed half the British people questioned, and nearly nine tenths of Americans questioned, claiming to be “middle class". What are they in the middle of? Class needs to be objectively defined—not by what clothes you wear, where you live, your accent or what job you happen to do, but by your real economic position in society, conditions of life, how you are able to live.

Nine tenths of the population are forced by economic necessity to go and look for a job, to work for a living. Hundreds of years ago peasants were driven from off their strips of land into the growing towns, and forced to hire themselves out as wage-workers. They are the ancestors of the workers of today, of the managers and the professors as much as the miners and dockers. Tools were replaced by machinery, work-rooms by factories, and small shopkeepers and craftsmen were squeezed out by the competition of the early manufacturing capitalists. Class today is still determined by people’s relation to the productive machinery of society: do you own the factory, or do you work in it? Do you organise the production of wealth or do you sit back and receive it as profit dividends? People who are cut off from ownership of the means of production are forced to work for wages and salaries which are worth less than the total wealth they produce. The owners, who do not depend on wages or salaries for their living, depend on getting the surplus which results.

All those who have to work for a living are in the working class, and share a common interest to improve their condition of life. A salary is only a monthly wage; Arthur Scargill’s proposal that all miners should be paid salaries would not actually improve their conditions. Many employees do not directly create wealth, but they administer, mend, teach, distribute and ensure the smooth running of the profit system which benefits their employers. They belong to the class which builds all housing from palaces to pigsties, makes all food from caviar to carry-outs. We are all turned into mere commodities on a shelf: pasted-up pieces of card in the labour agency windows. We have different prices pinned on us, because what has been necessary to make, mould and maintain each of us will itself vary.

The employer may want some of the labour power to be more trained than others. But the principle is always the same: selling our ability to work for a weekly or monthly price. According to the Royal Commission report referred to above, “Average earnings in different occupations have come to differ much less" (page 11). If you didn’t inherit great wealth, then all you can do is create great wealth but it won’t be yours, it will belong to the employers, the shareholders or government-bond holders who own the means of wealth production. According to Class in a Capitalist Society by J. Westergaard and H. Resler. (Penguin, 1975):

  The crucial common component in the life circumstances of the mass of wage earners is their dependence on market sale of the labour. How crucial is evident from the wide range of other terms in life which they share, and which clearly separate them, by a gap incomparably greater than the internal divisions among them, from the minority for whom the wheels of private capital turn.

A social class is a group of people who share a common economic and political interest, because they share the same basic position in human society. The working class is the vast majority in modern society, who between them own practically none of the stocks and shares, land, companies and raw materials. The “middle class” is a myth—as can be seen by looking at the people most commonly described in that way.

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Is there a middle class?
1. Managers. More than a hundred years ago Karl Marx clearly summed up the position of most managers:

  An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and NCOs (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function. (Capital, Vol. I, Pelican p. 450.)

In the recent national Census, this type of worker was covered by the category “employee supervising other employees”. A kind of industrial police, managers are given some measure of power over other workers, and are expected to maintain profitability, doing the shareholders’ dirty work for them by getting the most work for the least money out of the other employees. But the main point is that they are still just employees, dependent on their work and their wages for their living. They are also often particularly burdened with debt, through struggling to accumulate wealth after the manner of the chairmen and managing directors they idolise, by saving, borrowing and biting off more than they can chew.

They have not realised that capitalists build up wealth through the work of others; workers are exploited through their own work for companies they do not own. The Royal Report on Income and Wealth shows that people with less than £20,000 are generally in debt for about thirteen percent of what they own; for those with more than £200,000 the average debt is only about five per cent. Managers suffer the insecurity of all workers; they are threatened by redundancy. If profits begin to fall, it can be the more expensive “labour units” at the managerial end which are knocked off the pay-roll first. By the end of last year there were about 120,000 on the Professional and Executive Register of unemployed, and the Sunday Times published an article entitled: “The Redundant Executive”:

  Executive redundancy can be a brutal business. Firms often like the victims to go as quickly as possible, fearing an outburst of anger or resentment. Others shy away from the whole business and call in consultants to do the dirty work. Having built their careers around loyalty to the firm, redundant executives are often deeply wounded . . .The really loyal man with twenty years’ service can be a tragic figure, out of touch with the job market and inexperienced at winning in a job interview. He will be exceptional if he can even type his own job application letters and he will be shocked to learn that at 45. he may be considered too old. (14/12/1980.)

A course for redundant executives run by the Professional and Executive Recruitment section of the Manpower Services Commission, advises that they should “cast loyalty aside”, and suggests. “In panel interviews, remember you are a pawn in their game” and “If offered a job, ask immediately for written confirmation”. This is the kind of humiliating indignity which being in the working class involves.

2. Administrative and “White-collar” workers. The division between manual workers and “brain” workers is generally a false one. Could manual workers build a house without having brains? Could clerks work without manning the increasing bulk of manually operated office machinery? Recent action by workers in the Banking Insurance and Finance Union, the Council of Civil Service Unions, teachers, journalists, French magistrates (Guardian, 23/1/81) and even Finnish ecclesiastical workers (Guardian, 25/3/81) proves the point that all those who have to work for wages and salaries are in basically the same position. They must organise together to improve their conditions, by forming trade unions to maintain wage rates and by joining the political movement for a classless society. People who for years have clung on to the idea that they have a “middle class’ respectability are finally forced through economic pressure to concede that they, too, have to use the strike weapon to defend their living standards.

3. Shopkeepers and the Self-employed.
Most shopkeepers are really distributive workers, who work full hours running their shops, and have to struggle increasingly hard to compete with the ever-growing multinational supermarket chains. Although they are not directly employed by the large companies whose products they sell, they play a vital part in getting the goods from the production line to the consumers, and they are allowed to have a commission, a small cut of the profit involved, which rarely adds up to much more than the average salary of an accountant or an engineer. Few shopkeepers are able to retire at an early age with a financial empire to support them. In fact, they have no substantial property; they are members of the working class, struggling to hold on to a false independence. No lasting security or independence can be achieved without the ownership of substantial capital. Some of those officially described as “self-employed” are in fact capitalists, at the heads of enormous companies, so that the richest fifth of “self-employed” people receive more than half the total self-employed income (Income and Wealth report, page 18). But this does not alter the fact that generally, self-employed people depend for their living on their own daily work, and not on the work of others or the accumulation of capital. So they share the insecurity and poverty of the rest of the working class.

4. University graduates, artists and others. The small proportion of workers who go through university are being trained for particular kinds of jobs: mathematicians to analyse profitability, engineers to design productive machinery, historians to justify the existence of the profit system. They are all necessary to the owning class of employers, although at the moment provisions for universities are being cut back on the grounds that they are not absolutely essential to the production of profit in industry. If graduates cannot find jobs, they are reduced to the dole like any other worker. The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services recently reported that there were 55,000 graduates looking for jobs. Since only a small fraction of people go to university, this is roughly the same proportion of unemployed as the general level.

According to the Central Services Unit for Careers, fifteen per cent of arts students who graduated in 1979 were still unemployed by the end of the year. One university careers adviser makes it clear what class most students are in:

  It’s this discrepancy between the occupations for which arts graduates feel they are qualified, and the jobs they tend to end in, which causes a lot of unhappiness . . .The more idealistic will sometimes refuse to compromise, and may finish by having to learn the hard way. (Guardian, 6/1/81.)

Who are the capitalist class?
The capitalist class is a minority group which owns and controls the machinery of wealth production and distribution in modern society. It is highly exclusive and generally hereditary. The capitalist has power over the lives of the rest of us, because he or she possesses the land and factories which are needed to make the food and shelter we need if we are to live. They make sure that the transport, the schools, the industrial plant, the seas, are all run to provide them with profit out of the labour of others.

The capitalist class includes people like Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers. The Times and The Sun are read by millions of workers every day. “Tiny” Rowland, who buys chain stores for millions of pounds, while most of us can’t even afford to go shopping in such places as Harrods and Barkers of Kensington. It includes Sir James Goldsmith, Sir Keith Joseph, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, Peter Cadbury, Lord Sainsbury and anyone else who receives an unearned income of rent, interest or profit from owning land, financial or industrial capital. Wages and salaries may vary from £50 to £400, but each million pounds invested can yield an unearned income of thousands each week.

It is almost as if the capitalist class inhabits a separate world. Not having to spend time working for money, they are able to go shooting, hunting, ski-ing, travelling . . . asked in a recent television interview whether he meets people with much less money than himself, the outspoken millionaire Rupert Dean said “Not if I can help it”. Inside the showrooms of Bonhams, Cartier, Sotheby and Christies, behind the oak doors of the Turf, Boodles, Whites, the Royal Yacht Squadron and in dinner parties at Claridges, the Dorchester and Annabels, the parasite elite eat, drink and spend lavishly. They do not experience our menial cares and worries about money.

The Duke of Westminster, aged 28, recently inherited nearly 200,000 acres of land across the world, including 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia valued at £1,000,000,000. To him, it wouldn’t matter whether you are a manager, a poet, a printer or a gardener: you are a worker, to be hired to increase his wealth. At his wedding last year, he was reported as saying: “It’s absolutely true that we won’t have to worry about rents or mortgages or anything like that”. When Lord Brownlow’s four-year-old son inherited £3 million in 1979. he said that “he will remain a very normal little boy”: it is “normal” for children of capitalists to get more for their birthday than a worker on £100 a week would earn in six hundred years.

At Christies on 30 March 1981, Dr. Marino Chiavelli spent £1,364,000 on seven paintings (The Times, 1/4/81). These are to decorate his 48-room Johannesburg villa and his London eighteenth- century mansion. The night he was interviewed he was leaving London to visit Switzerland, The United States and South Africa, but he had time to explain that he owns about a dozen companies in the construction and crude oil businesses.

The way ahead
The capitalist class and the working class live totally different lives. Some workers are just paying NHS contributions, others pay BUFA private contributions; the capitalist's insurance for the future is a lasting hold over the bulk of the earth’s resources. The Duke of Westminster is not employed, but he doesn’t need the dole either. You can't get the sack from the security of property. It is the minerals, companies, share portfolios, lands, properties and industrial plant of the capitalist which provide real security and dominate society. A hundred years ago, clerks could hope sometimes to become partners in the small family firms they worked for. Now, ownership has become concentrated, and divorced from managerial work. Small firms are forced out of business or swallowed up by larger ones.

Units of production grow, and production takes on an increasingly socialised form, with millions working together to produce wealth. There is no room for snobbishness in the expanding class of employees who hold the key to a socialist future. Social mobility is a myth. To save up to buy the Duke of Westminster’s London land at the rate of ten pounds a week, would take two million years. World capitalism causes war, poverty and insecurity; but it is perpetuated by the futile ambitions of some workers who shirk class unity for the sake of their false hopes of becoming capitalists themselves.

Clifford Slapper