Rifts in the Tory Party (1981)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prior to the Cabinet meeting on 17 June the press, TV and radio worked up a lot of sound and fury about the impending great battle between the hard-line “drys”—Thatcher’s supporters—and the soft-line “wets” seeking to force changes of policy. The media spokesmen had many explanations of what the battle was about and what the outcome would be. And when it was over they offered a wide choice of verdicts, ranging from the official one that there wasn’t any battle, to reports that the rebels had been out manoeuvred. They were all agreed that the chief leader of revolt was Peter Walker, Minister of Agriculture, who only a week later publicly voiced his criticisms. “Without sending Mrs Thatcher an advance copy of his speech. Mr. Peter Walker, one of the leading ‘wets’ in the Cabinet, yesterday argued forcefully against the Government's rigid stand on monetarism when he addressed the British-American Chamber of Commerce in New York”. (The Times 23 June).

One interpretation is that Walker. who had backed Ted Heath against Thatcher when she was elected Tory Leader, has the ambition to take her place. In any event he never did agree with her “monetarist” policy. When, in the late seventies, the majority of Tories threw overboard the Keynesian nonsense as a cure-all for capitalism and adopted in its place the “monetarist” nonsense. Walker (like Heath and some others) remained an unrepentant follower of Keynes: it was he who described his party as the party of Keynes and Disraeli. (He shares his continued devotion to Keynesian doctrine with the various wings of the Labour Party, the Liberals and the TUC).

What brought about the conversion to “monetarism” was the course taken by unemployment. In 1944 the Tories, the Labour Party and the Liberals, all represented in the war-time coalition government, issued an agreed document based on the belief that Keynes was the answer to capitalism's problems and in particular that such policies would guarantee “full employment”.

For a decade unemployment did remain very low, both under the Labour Government (1945-1951) and under the following Tory Government. (From 1945 to 1957 it averaged under 400,000). So it was possible for Harold Wilson to claim in 1957 that “all major parties” (Tory, Labour and Liberal) were still committed Keynesians. But since then unemployment has risen to continually higher peaks: to a million under Heath’s government (1970-1974), to over 1,600,000 under Labour (1974-1979) and now to over 2½ million. The Thatcher wing of the Tory leadership concluded that the old agreed policy was wrong and they fought, and won, the May 1979 General Election on the new “monetarist” policy.

In practice the Keynesians believe that, by increasing government expenditure, unemployment can always be kept at a low level. The new, Thatcher, policy reversed this and aimed to reduce government expenditure, government borrowing and the level of taxation, and by so doing curb inflation and reduce unemployment.

Although the Tories do not mention it, their policy is in essence the one recommended by Harold Wilson in 1957 and which he said would be adopted by a Labour government to deal with inflation.

  In inflationary times . . . all are agreed in theory on the need for public saving through a large Budget surplus . . . 

and

  we should not hesitate to use monetary controls ruthlessly if necessary, as one in an armoury of weapons.

But after more than two years in office the Thatcher government has done none of the things it promised. Instead of going down government expenditure, government borrowing and the level of taxation have all gone up, one reason being the enormous cost of paying benefit to an added 1¼ million unemployed. The Tory leaders are now fearful that unemployment will go on rising and cause them to lose the next election, and the Walker rebels no doubt see the possibility that the Tories will, before then, go back to Keynes, and perhaps unseat Thatcher as party leader.

The truth is that capitalism’s periodic swings into depression and heavy unemployment take place no matter what policy the government follows. Apart from rigging the unemployment figures or subsidising employers to keep unemployed workers on the pay roll, there is almost nothing governments can do about it except wait for the depression to pass. But professional politicians, whether they believe it or not, have to pretend to the electors that their government can and will provide full employment: which means that they have to ignore the evidence.

A case in point is the claim by Foot, Healey and Bonn that Labour Government means low unemployment, indeed “jobs for all”. Here are the facts. Since June 1929 there have been four periods of Labour government, totalling nearly twenty years. In every one of those four periods unemployment has been higher when Labour left office than when it went in. In the first period (1929-1931) it went up by 1,600,000, and in the last period (1974-1979) it more than doubled, from 636,000 to nearly 1,300,000.

In the past the Tories have been luckier, with their electoral victories coming at a time when depression was passing, but they are now faced with the prospect that recovery from the present depression will not take place in time for the next election, in or before May 1984.

Another big electoral issued involved in the Thatcher adoption of monetarism is that of inflation. Unlike unemployment, about which governments can do nothing, inflation—the rise of prices caused by an excess issue of inconvertible paper money—is entirely under government control. This was shown, for example, by the Lloyd George government when, in, December 1919, it decided on a policy of deflation. By reducing the notes in circulation it not only halted the price rise but brought about a drastic fall in prices.

In May 1979 the Thatcher Government declared its intention of curbing inflation and eventually stopping it entirely by means of “monetarism”. It is worth recalling that when in 1944 the three parties adopted Keynes, they too promised “a more or less stable price level”. The reality has been that prices are now more than ten times what they were in 1945, and Thatcher’s new policy has proved just as useless to curb inflation. In her two years of office prices have gone up by 36 per cent and are still rising.

It must be emphasised that the use by the “monetarists” of the term “controlling the money supply” does not mean that they accept Marx’s explanation of inflation or are repeating the deflation policy of the 1919 government. They explicitly repudiate the theory that an excess issue of paper money raises prices, and since May 1979 the Thatcher government has increased the excess of notes in circulation by a further £1300 million. And it is a delusion that the presence or absence of inflation makes any difference to capitalism’s periodic depressions and high unemployment.

Two other issues that were alleged to have been fought over in the Tory Cabinet were the foreign exchange rate of the pound, and the grant of further large sums to the nationalised Coal Industry and British Rail. Some commentators presented these issues in terms of the supposed preference of the whole body of business men for a low pound exchange rate, and their hostility to nationalisation. This superficial view overlooks that each company is concerned with its own profits and survival, and capitalist interests accordingly are divided. Companies heavily involved with exports or which receive profits from investments abroad gain by a low pound exchange rate, while importing companies gain by a high rate. Thus companies engaged in supplying plant and machinery to the coal industry or for railway electrification, were delighted with the government decision to make further grants to the Coal Board and British Rail.

Like all Cabinets, whether Tory or Labour, occupied as they are with handling the problems capitalism continually throws up, the Thatcher Cabinet will go on being divided by the infighting of ambitious politicians promoting their careers.

Edgar Hardcastle

"Bottoming Out"? (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the current slump coming to an end, “bottoming out” as Francis Pym puts it? It is in his opinion, as well as that of the Governor of the Bank of England and Leon Brittan, Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

They could be right because sooner or later the slump will come to an end. As Marx pointed out “permanent crises do not exist”. His study of the workings of capitalism led him to the conclusion that “the life of industry” is “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation” and to speak of “repeated self-perpetuating cycles, whose successive phases embrace years, and always culminate in a general crisis, which is the end of one cycle and the starting-point of another”.

The course of production under capitalism is cyclic: boom-slump-boom-slump-boom-slump. In the long-run the trend is upward but this is by no means a steady, continuous growth; it is a growth by fits and starts so that the graph of production is one of peaks and troughs with, generally (but not always), the last peak higher than the preceding one.

But we don’t have to go back to Marx for this. With the complete discrediting of Keynes in recent years, a little less misunderstanding of how capitalism works has crept back into the universities and even into government circles. Leon Brittan, for instance, told a meeting of the Teeside and District Chamber of Commerce and Industry on 24 April:

  My first answer to the question “How will the recovery come about?” is “naturally, just as day follows night”. The regularity of the business cycle in this and, I suspect, every economy may not be fully explicable, but its existence is undeniable. The Central Statistical Office have analysed it lucidly in their work on the “cyclical indicators”. They tell us that the normal cycle lasts a little over four years; that it begins with an expansionary phase of some 20 months, and ends with a slightly longer period of some 30 months of much slacker activity. Though the timing is not precise to the last month, the rhythm is well established. And, more important, though the extent of the expansion and slow-down differs, there has been no trade cycle since the first world war in which output has not grown significantly in the expansionary phase. So phases of growth are truly a central feature of the natural rhythms of our economy. One would need the most compelling evidence imaginable before believing that we had suddenly departed from that pattern of behaviour.

It is equally true of course that phases of slump are “a central feature of the natural rhythms of our economy”, but Brittan at least recognises that there is a business cycle and that it is “normal” under capitalism. And he is right that a recovery must follow a recession, as night follows day, even if he could be wrong about the timing. For while it is true that sooner or later the present slump will come to an end. there is no way of telling whether this will happen sooner or later. Brittan, as a politician, naturally hopes that it will be sooner. In the case of the Governor of the Bank of England (where Keynesian illusions are still fairly well entrenched), it is probably more an attempt to influence the psychology of businessmen by giving them the impression that things are getting better in the hope that this will get them to begin reinvesting. In other words, trying to talk them out of the crisis in accordance with one of the crack-pot ideas thought up by economists.

Doing Nothing

One of the implications of the view that capitalist production goes through a series of “repeated, self-perpetuating cycles” is that government intervention can do little to influence this—except, as Marx pointed out, to provoke a crisis prematurely, but certainly not to bring about a recovery before it would normally occur anyway. Doing nothing is in fact just as effective, or rather ineffective, as applying the whole range of Keynesian gimmicks. The plain fact is that governments do not control the workings of capitalism and that capitalism will continue to go through the boom-slump-boom-slump cycle in its own time regardless of what they do.

The present Tory government seems to have accepted this fact of capitalist economic life. At any rate it is at the moment behaving as if it had, since, despite the howls from the die-hard Keynesians in the Labour Party and the TUC, it is in effect just sitting back waiting—hoping and praying too, no doubt—for the recession to bottom out naturally.

The reason a slump is sooner or later followed by a boom is that slump conditions themselves create the condition for a recovery: a restoration of profitability. It may seem paradoxical that, as at the moment, there should be increased company profits and rising share prices alongside industrial stagnation and massive unemployment, but this is what happens towards the end of a slump. At the beginning of the slump, just after the crisis, profits are hit but as the slump continues it creates the conditions for a restoration of profit levels.

First of all by leading to a “devaluation” of capital. In other words, to a fall in the value of the total capital on which the rate of profit is calculated, permitting, with the same amount of profit, an increase in the rate of profit. This devaluation of capital does not necessarily mean that it is physically destroyed (though this is an extreme form which occurs in all slumps, including the present one) but that the replacement value of the physical components of capital (machines, factories, stocks) falls. For instance, when a company goes bankrupt its assets are eventually sold, but well below the price at which they were bought. The company which buys these assets now has the same physical assets but, as they have a lesser value, will be able to register a higher rate of profit than the previous owner even if the amount of profit remains the same.

A similar process occurs within firms which don't actually go bankrupt. They are forced to write off part of the value of their assets, so restoring the rate of profit. This process—bankruptcies, closures, take-overs, mergers—has been going on for the last few years and, if the speculations on the Stock Exchange are anything to go by, the stage may have been reached where profit levels have been sufficiently restored for the recovery phase of the economic cycle to begin. Or it may just turn out to be a bump along the bottom.

A second reason why profit levels are sooner or later restored in a slump is that wages fall. The value added in the course of production is divided into profits and wages, so that a fall in wages automatically increases the share of profits. Wages—real wages that is, or what they can buy in relation to the prices of consumer goods—fall in a slump because all the closures and bankruptcies result in an increase in unemployment. An increased number of sellers of labour-power turns the labour market more in favour of employers. As always happens when supply exceeds demand prices tend to fall. The labour market is no exception: with increased unemployment wages, which are the price of the mental and physical energies a worker sells to an employer, tend to fall.

Actually, in this age of chronic inflation, the amount of pounds in the wage packet does not decrease (except through short-time working and less overtime but we are talking about basic wage rates here). What happens is that wages increase less than the prices of other goods. When, in a period of double-figure inflation, trade unions settle for single-figure wage increases—as they are at the moment being obliged by economic circumstances to do—this is, in terms of purchasing power, a wage decrease just as much as the decreases in money wages wages which trade unions were obliged to negotiate in the slump of the 1930s. Then there was no inflation so it was clear straightaway what was going on. The same thing has been happening in the current slump, but because of inflation it is not so obvious. But the economic effect of these wage decreases has been the same: to help restore the rate of profit, a fact which has not escaped the attention of Leon Brittan. He gave as one of the factors making for a recovery:

  The latest wage round is seeing much lower wage settlements and therefore substantial reductions in the growth of pay bills: and we are witnessing dramatic improvements in productivity. These changes should correct part of the loss of competitiveness in many industries, and strengthen profitability.

So when will the slump come to an end? This year, next year, sometime, never? Knowing how anarchical capitalism is we are not going to engage in crystal ball-gazing or sooth-saying like the professional economists and lay down an exact date for the recovery. The recovery stage of the capitalist economic cycle will be reached sooner or later, that is certain, but whether it will come in time for the run-up to the next General Flection in 1983 or 1984, as Madame Thatcher told the Scottish Tories at the end of May that it would, is a different matter altogether. Later could be as late as the end of the 1980s. Capitalism has seen prolonged slumps before.

Adam Buick

A death on the ocean wave (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The profit making drive of capitalism demands that no institution, however steeped in the traditions of history, is immutable or inviolate. Nothing—and most certainly not the vapourings of the nostalgically-inclined—will be permitted to stand in the path of exploitation and accumulation.

So it is with that steadfast and patriotic instrument of human misery and oppression, the Royal Navy. In an age in which British capitalism, no longer in a position to plunder the riches of a colonial empire, has found it more convenient to throw in its lot with Western Europe, the Navy in its present form has come to be seen as an increasingly expensive anachronism. (Philip Geddes, in an article contributed to the New Statesman of 29 May, compared the cost—£7 million—of a Leander class frigate of eight years ago with its £130 million successor, the all-missile-armed Type 22).

That the Navy is still required to “defend" British shores does not alter the fact of the increasing irrelevancy of much of its hardware: an ocean-going battle-fleet is a highly impracticable proposition when it comes to keeping open the Channel ports. And, as Geddes has observed, “The fishery-protection and offshore-resources squadron is something of a joke—sometimes, its ships can be outrun by modern trawlers." In short, some sections of the sea-going Navy are ripe for the chop.

The Navy is also farcically top-heavy in other areas. For example, there is an admiral for every front-line ship currently in commission—nearly 100 in all. The Admiralty also employs 32,000 workers in its naval dockyards and a further 5,700 personnel in its administrative and design departments at Bath. So the dockyards are to be run down and savings made elsewhere.

These decisions must be viewed in the context of the government’s determination to arm itself with a Trident missile submarine fleet. For this baleful indulgence Britain’s capitalists must stump up £6 billion—a figure already challenged as a gross under-estimate. Then there is the (again, conservatively-estimated) £10 billion to be found over the next ten years to pay for the replacement—with the Tornado—of the ageing Jaguar and Vulcan bombers. Set these figures alongside military spending during the current financial year alone of £12.3 billion, to which must be added the £220 million spent so far on the recently-launched and almost certainly abortive aircraft carrier Ark Royal and we have some measure of British capitalism's current arms-spending problems.

One conclusion must stand out clearly from the current debate on the condition of the Navy and of the armed forces as a whole: it has nothing to do with a reduction in the destructive capacity of the British ruling class. As has been indicated, if the Navy is to be pruned it is because it has become, at least insofar as its surface vessels are concerned, inordinately expensive, and highly vulnerable to attack from guided missiles.

The Trident missile system, on the other hand, is massively effective and relatively invulnerable. A frigate tied up in port or sinking in the Channel is no match for a submarine containing—should the Defence Ministry opt for the most advanced form of Trident—sixteen D5 missiles each fitted with fourteen independently-targeted warheads.

Arms Sales

A revealing—and wholly characteristic—factor in ruling class thinking on armaments is what is sometimes euphemistically termed “spin-off”. This means the sale of military hardware to “friendly" powers. Such sales not only line the pockets of the arms manufacturers and traders but can also offset in part the manufacturing country’s own arms budget. Capitalists the world over vie with each other to exploit the available markets. One has only to recall the deal short-circuited by the Iranian revolution—made by the British government to sell the Shir-Iran tank to that other implacable enemy of the working class, the late unlamented Shall of Iran, to understand how much profit is up for grabs in such transactions. Not that such profiteering is confined to western capitalism: its eastern counterparts, as represented by Russia and China, paddle in the same stinking morass.

The crowning irony, even to those who view the more bizarre of capitalism’s activities with relative equanimity, must be the projected sale, by the USA, of arms to the Chinese. And this coming on top of the disclosure by US Government officials that the USA has equipped two listening posts in north-west China for the purpose of monitoring Russian missile tests. What price America’s alleged ideological differences with “communist” China now?

But in this same field, perhaps the ruling class of India must take the highest a- ward. In 1978 ninety of their surplus Centurian tanks found their way, through the Spanish arms firm Barrieros Hermanos and a Norwegian broker, Fearnley and Eger Chartering, of Oslo, to, of all places, Pretoria. (Guardian, 15 May).

Both western and eastern capitalists can fall foul of their own perfidy as a consequence of shifting political and economic alliances: the USA and Vietnam, for example; or Russia and Egypt. In each case the client state changed sides. But, whichever way the cat jumps, the mercenary crooks who enrich themselves by dealing in arms are unlikely to require a change of pillow in the night. Rather will they buy themselves a new phrase-book.

The cost of fighter aircraft has become astronomically high. Jan Connell, Defence Correspondent of the Sunday Times (29/5/81) quotes a study by James Fallows, Ex President Carter's speechwriter: “One aircraft manufacturer estimates that 'if present trends continue, by the year 2054 today’s entire American defence budget would buy just one plane' ”. Dare we hope that capitalism will one day strangle itself in the entrails of its own ludicrous “defence" policies?

Who Loses

As for us of the working class, we may indulge ourselves with hand-wringing lamentation — our masters' withers will remain unwrung. The fact remains, however, that it is through the efforts of the working class alone that the arms race is allowed to proceed at all. Who, after all, makes the weapons? Who makes the machines that make the components that go to make up the weapons? Who works the mines? and who pours the steel? Indeed, who makes the paper and metals to provide the capitalists with their money-tokens and their bills of exchange, without which no marketing could take place? One thing is certain: it is not the capitalist. (But who will sweep up the profits?)

The largest question of all, however, must be: who are destined to slaughter each other in unprecedented numbers with the sterile products of their own labour-and brain-power in the next of capitalism’s wars? Once we start to ask ourselves questions such as these we are halfway toward finding the answer to others even more pertinent. But such interrogation is a service we can only render ourselves; nobody else can do it for us.

Richard Cooper

Blackpool Lights (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

An event of some interest to 400,000 members of the working class took place at Blackpool in May. It received a bit of coverage in the daily press, although this was mainly concerned with matters that had little to do with the supposed purpose of the event. There was the speech by Denis Healey, headed in the Guardian (13/5/81) “The Enemy Within”, designed to further his bid for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. There was also the odd mention of the “nasty Left”, “little Stalins”, and “dogmatic sectarians”. Oh no, you may cry, not another Labour Party meeting or Left Wing gathering. No indeed. The event was in fact the Bi-Annual Conference of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunication and Plumbers Union—the EETPU, a trade union of 400,000 members.

The Conference was one of those stage-managed affairs that anyone acquainted with the majority of non-socialist organisations soon gets used to. The daily press, while seeing fit to cover Healey’s speech, showed little interest in the fact that 5,000 members of the union in Birmingham were without any representation at the Conference because the Executive had decided to suspend the meetings of Midland Branch 18 months before. Nor was much print given over to the similar plight of London Central Branch, whose 7,000 members made the mistake of wishing to elect their own delegates to the local Labour Party; their main Branch activity soon became the collecting of members’ dues. Then, of course, there was the compositing of motions, weeding out those that might rock the boat, all helping to ensure that the Conference ran smoothly, without any significant opposition. Finally, there were the lost resolutions. No, not those lost through voting those resolutions lost in the post, that for some strange reason never reached the Conference at all. Like the one from Worcester Branch about Branch suspensions and—coincidence of coincidences—their delegate did not receive his credentials in time for Conference either.

There should be no illusions about democracy under capitalism. It’s ten to one that the word will flow from a politician’s or trade union leader’s lips whenever they mount a rostrum, but more often than not it’s a smoke screen for a power struggle over who is going to help run capitalism. The dispute between Benn and Healey in the Labour Party is mirrored in trade unions like the EETPU. The form of elections and voting is structured by those with power for the purpose of furthering their positions, and keeping any opposition out. While in the Labour Party the struggle is over whether MPs or the block union votes should dominate the election of the leader, in the EETPU it has been over whether Branches and local union organisations or the central executive backed by the periodical voting of the members should be the main decision makers. The latter sounds more democratic, but in reality little opportunity to put their case is given to those who wish to stand in opposition to the executive council backed candidates. The executive of the union have control of the union media, the EETPU paper, plus greater access to the national press. Besides this, any opposition that is elected stands a good chance of being ruled out of order for infringing some rule or other.

But these internal struggles for power and the manipulation that goes on cannot be divorced from the fact that the majority of the union members take little active interest in its affairs. For many, the union card has simply become a job ticket. Further, some of the traditional benefits of trade unionism, such as unemployment payout, have been taken over by the state. On top of this, the bulk of union funds is now spent on administration. Even when members are in a dispute they often find they have to fight the union as well as the employers.

Democracy is only as powerful a tool as the desires and aspirations of those who have access to it. It is not much use having the vote if it is not used, nor is it much use if its potential is not appreciated. While workers go on electing and believing in leaders, whether in unions or in government, then voting systems will never be more than potential means of creating a democratic society. But past experience shows that at election after election Labour or Conservative governments have been returned to run an economic system that operates against the interests of the majority of people. And, whether because of scepticism or a general recognition that it doesn't make much difference who runs capitalism, many don't bother to vote at all. The position in the EETPU in many ways reflects this, with only a small percentage of members bothering to vote at those few elections that do take place.

Frank Chapple, the General Secretary of the EETPU has a long history of participation in the internal power struggles of the union. He was a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s at the time when the CP took over many of the posts in the then Electrical Trades Union. The electrical trades being at the heart of most industries, this influence inside the union gave the CP a degree of power to disrupt large sectors of production. The union only had to get a few members to stop work for a short time and whole industries and areas could be brought to a standstill.

In the 1950s the revelations about Stalin’s atrocities in Russia led to many former believers abandoning the myth of Russian socialism. Frank Chapple was one of the the ETU members who left the Communist Party and who, along with political figures such as Woodrow Wyatt, worked to get rid of the CPers. They eventually succeeded, with the help of the law courts, in exposing cases of ballot rigging.

For most members of the union there was little immediate change. The exposure of ballot rigging and the subsequent change in leaders made little difference. The new executive council said it would ensure that democracy in the union was upheld, traditions respected—the usual rhetoric. All this happened in the early 1960s. Then changes were made. Certain members of the executive went to the
USA, were influenced by the business type, centrally organised unions there, and came back with big ideas. In 1965 major changes in the rule book were made. In the years that followed the streamlining measures included the abolition of area committees and the appointment by the executive of what were formally elected union officials. Members were sent voting papers which, on the face of it, appeared to be concerned with with wage rates, but in fact included changes in rules and conditions. Union members found themselves voting for all manner of things even though their main concern would be the increase in wages. On one of these votes even tea breaks were abolished (this writer remembers one socialist, at that time a member of the union, who on hearing of this decision tore up his union card). The last 15 years have been a constant process of movement toward a highly organised, bureaucratically controlled union, centralised to the point where nearly all correspondence has to circulate through the General Secretary.

What then has Denis Healey’s speech, at Blackpool, and the power struggle in the Labour Party, got to do with defending the wages and conditions of workers in the EETPU? Precisely nothing. It shouldn’t be surprising then that such Conferences are used as political platforms for expressing the views of one side or the other in the Labour Party’s power struggle. And just as “unity” is the constant call of all sides in that struggle (while they stab each other in the back) so “unity” in union affairs means keeping those who oppose the present leaders outside of the Conference. That is in fact where they were.

MD

Robots at your service (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We are entering into a second industrial revolution, the era of automation. This time it is not man’s muscles that are to be replaced and extended but rather man's brains 

Though the above statement appeared in a book published in 1952, the underlying sentiment is not altogether modern. The chilling thought of man the creator threatened by his own creation is echoed for example in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, published in 1817.

But the early nineteenth century was the era of the Luddite riots when workers protested not against automation—the word was first coined in 1946 by Del Harder, an executive with the Ford Motor company—but mechanisation. In the 1950s however, when a survey was carried out in Detroit asking people whom or what they feared most, automation came second in the list behind ‘‘the Russians.” But what exactly is automation and what is the nature of the threat it is supposed to represent? In an article in the New Scientist (12/2/81) Peter Marsh explained.

  Every activity has three essential elements: power, action and control. When control is exercised by a mechanical device it is called automatic or self-acting.
  An example is the pressure cooker (invented in 1680). But automatic is not the same as automated. For something to be described as automated requires that it has at least one of three additional features. It must firstly make use of a “systems approach” whereby things are made by passing them through successive stages of a manufacturing process without human intervention. Secondly, the device must be programmable, that is, able to do more than one kind of job. And finally, it must have the capacity to receive and process feedback information through sensors to adjust its routine according to changes that occur around it.

On the basis of this analysis Marsh defines three broad technological revolutions that have taken place over some two and a half centuries (roughly the time capitalism has been in existence).

The first of these was the Machine Revolution (1750-1860). It brought about big advances in both the “action” and “power” elements of activities such as textile manufacture. Next came the Scientific Revolution (1880-1920) characterised by the growth of science-based industries such as chemicals and electrical goods. It was followed after the second world war by the Computer Revolution which has greatly extended, and is continually extending, control over the processes of manufacturing.

Some indication of the tremendous strides that have taken place in the world of computers can be seen from the following:

  One authority has observed that the first computer sold in 1950 filled a room yet it is now possible to buy a micro-computer with a lot more capacity which is 30,000 times smaller. At the same time the cost in 1950 adjusted to present values was £1 million, whilst the equivalent micro-computer today is £200. Because there are no components there is very little to go wrong and thus the possibilities of failures and breakdown which cannot quickly be restored by replacing the relatively cheap silicon chip, are very small. The micro-computer is therefore very reliable. (Management Accounting May 1981)

The job of a computer is to interpret a series of binary digits, which in the earliest computers were represented by cumbersome and inefficient thermionic valves, which were superseded by the electronic switch or transistor. Yet a further development was the integrated circuit, which enables all the electronic components of a whole computer to be contained on a tiny wafer of silicon: the silicon chip or micro-processor. But already a successor is within sight: the Josephson circuit, which will make computing thousands of times faster by utilising the super-conductivity of certain materials at temperatures near absolute zero.

In the fifties the first “automation scare” was at its height. Subsequently, concern subsided only to reappear recently. Last year, for example, a confidential Labour Party policy document captured the headlines by arguing for a “socialist planned economy” (more state managed capitalism) to meet the challenge of the micro-chip.

But what justification is there for this renewed concern? Marsh offers four reasons why “1980-style automation will have a bigger effect on work than the first computer controlled factories”. The first is the growth in the number of computers. In 1960 there were a mere 10,000. Today there are around 700,000 “big” computers costing more than £10,000 as well as tens of millions of smaller ones based on micro-processors.

Secondly, the technical advances in micro-electronics have enormously increased the versatility and scope of computer technology. The significance of the chip is in its size: it is not only cheap and fast (messages don’t have far to travel) but can be used in places where a computer could not be accommodated before. As a result the purpose of computers is no longer simply to store, manipulate, retrieve and organise masses of statistical information. Increasingly they are used in control, monitoring, regulation and automation.

The emergence of the industrial robot neatly illustrates the point. A robot is defined as a mechanical arm which is controlled by a computer. Of the 8000 world robot population in 1980 almost all were “first generation”—big, clumsy, expensive devices used mainly for such work as welding and paint spraying. The newer lightweight “second generation” robots now being produced can manipulate items with amazing precision. An example is the PUMA made by an American company, Unimation, which costs £20.000 and can position things to within 0.1mm.

One reason robots have hitherto made little headway in Britain is the low wages here compared to mainland Europe. As an article in the Guardian explained: “We are in a curiously inverted trap; low labour costs depress the necessity to use advanced technology which in turn decreases the rate of development of technology itself.” (22/11/79). And as the same article pointed out, Britain does not have an overfull order book nor an insufficient workforce to cope with it. Not that the absence of an “overfull order book” signifies that people's needs have been satisfied; true to its absurd and contradictory nature, capitalism is in a slump, intensifying the poverty it compels workers to endure in an age of potential plenty.

But the growing dexterity of robots together with their declining costs in relation to labour costs, make them an increasingly attractive proposition. Indeed, according to statistics from the US car industry, the total cost of the human worker is now $19 an hour while that of a robot is $5.40 an hour (Guardian 19/5/ 81.) And there is another factor to take into account. While automated equipment may work all the anti-social hours an employer may want and not go on strike, it does have a drawback; it cannot be sacked should the state of the market render its loyal services redundant.

To some extent this disadvantage has receded with the advent of the robot. Hitherto, it was mainly the biggest firms with funds to match, involved in the mass production of thousands of items in a single production run, who could afford to automate. The equipment is normally unprogrammable, designed to carry out a fixed routine.

Not so with the robot, which can be programmed to make a variety of products. This means that automation need no longer be restricted to mass production by the economies of scale. Using the same robot—which is within the price range of of even small firms—the automation of small-scale “batch production" has become a distinct possibility, allowing the manufacturer to rapidly switch to a different product should the need arise.

The implications of such flexibility are significant. According to the Economist (24/3/78), “ . . . over four fifths of the world's manufactured products are still made in batch lots of between 10 and 50 units usually at a cost of at least five times that of a mass produced item". The automation of batch manufacture will also be made easier by the chip based computerised scheduling of changes in the raw materials needed.

Moreover the potential scope of robot applications is growing. Recently, the Japanese Industrial Robot Association reported that there are more than 100 products. among them freezers, calculators and TV sets, now assembled by human factory workers that could be made by existing robots which can “see". (New Scientist 12/6/80). As for the future, Joe Engelberger, president of Unimation, has estimated that “. . . the next generation of robots-mobile, multi-armed, understanding speech, talking and with rudimentary vision and a finer sense of touch — would be around for practical use in about three years time.” (Guardian 19/5/ 81)

The impression that may have been gained, that the drive to automate will spell a massive loss in jobs, needs to be put in perspective. Though the increased use of computer technology will entail a certain amount of job loss, its application will open up new areas of work—for example in software (programming). This is shown by the increasing ratio of software to hardware costs which were 2:1 in 1973 and are forecast to be 10:1 by 1985. Mass unemployment is not the result of technological progress but is a feature of capitalism in a depression. The bleak outlook for the world's economy is another reason for Marsh's concern over automation. The growth rate in the seventies was roughly half that of the sixties. This, argues Marsh, “decreased the opportunities for governments to create and pay out of taxation, the jobs in services that did much to absorb the people squeezed out of manufacturing over the past 20 years.”

The suggestion here that automation will serve to exacerbate the problem needs to be examined in the light of the circumstances that persuade or dissuade an employer to automate. Under capitalism the direction, pace and extent of technological innovation is dictated not by human need or conscious will, but by the prospect of profit. Without profit production grinds to a halt, irrespective of the needs of people or the degree of technical sophistication employed.

Another characteristic of capitalism is its basic instability. Unplanned, it moves in continuous cycles of market expansion and contraction. Though a boom cannot be sustained indefinitely neither is there such a thing as a permanent slump. Marsh observes that the effects of new technology on the labour force will be far less marked when it is introduced at times of increasing demand for goods than when demand is falling. But in a recession when much existing technology is often underused, the incentive to introduce new technology will be considerably less anyway than at a time of rising demand, when firms strive to increase output and offset the increased cost of labour power.

If the decline in manufacturing industry is irreversible, runs the argument, future employment would have to be found increasingly in the service industries if mass unemployment is to be averted. Ironically, the pessimistic view of the effects of new technology on work is centred more on service than manufacturing:

  The information occupations (secretaries, typists, clerks managers) are thought to amount to 65 per cent of the working population so that even moderate improvements in productivity could bring about unemployment levels in the region of 10 to 20 per cent unless offset by compensatory increases in demand in these and other activities. By comparison, the impact of new technology on employment in manufacturing is expected to be relatively small. The overall consequences are said to be comparable with the industrial revolution. (New Scientist 26/4/79)

An example of “improved productivity" would be the truly paperless office, a vital requirement of which would be a practical electronic method of filing documents quickly and cheaply. Philips have already developed a prototype system called Megador which achieves the necessary speed—it can read and store an A4 page in one second and retrieve any document in 5 seconds—but is regarded as too expensive for all but the largest firms (New Scientist 23/4/81) Twenty years ago in America Congressman Adam Powell launched an official investigation into “the impact of automation on employment” with a warning that “the Frankenstein of automation has come closer to us”. If ever there was a case of mistaken identity it is this. That the elimination of drudgery and the increases in productivity that automation makes should come to be seen as a threat is an indictment of the society we live in.

Machines are neither masterful nor submissive. It is men and women, having or lacking possession of the means of wealth production, who relate to each other in this way. Capitalism is the monster we ought to fear and hate. Who can regard a system that perverts technology into a means of inflicting global destruction with anything but apprehension? Who can say that such a system is efficient, when so much of its productive effort does not satisfy the needs of people?

Thanks to the computer revolution we are potentially better able now than ever before to organise effectively the socialist production and distribution of wealth. All that stands in the way is an increasingly outdated social system.

Robin Cox

Coping with the car (1964)

From the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of these days, we have been told by Mr. Marples, we’re going to wake up wondering what's hit us. In rather more elegant language, and at much greater length, the Buchanan report has warned us of the same thing. What is going to hit us, both literally and metaphorically, is the motor car.

Only recently the inhabitants of Kingston on Thames were given a foretaste of what Mr. Marples meant when one Saturday afternoon the whole of the town came to a complete standstill. For a couple of hours no vehicle could get into the town and nothing could get out. The panicky thought even occurred to some of those marooned, apparently, that they never were going to get out.

Is this really what is in store for us? Is the motor vehicle really going to end by overwhelming our cities, wiping out community life, completely dominating our existence? Or will capitalism, which has generated the monster, be finally forced to come to terms with it? And is it really capable of doing this? Are we to be impressed by Buchanan, or is he going to go the way of all the other Utopians up against the harsh realities of private interests and individual ownership? Let us consider a few facts first.

At the beginning of 1963, there were about eight million four-wheeled motor vehicles on this country’s roads; by the end of if, they will have been joined by another million. Estimates are for 13 million in 1970, and for 20 million by 1980, an average of one for every three people or one for every 20 yards of road (actually less since the population is concentrated into certain areas and not evenly spread). All this is prophecy, of course, and one hefty slump in a year or two's time could knock all these figures for six. But the essential problem has already posed itself and will only get worse unless it is dealt with one way or another.

This headlong development is not peculiar to this country. France already has nine million vehicles and will have increased on this number by a further half million by the end of the year; , with a much larger area the problem is not so far quite so acute, but Paris has even worse traffic jams than London, and the other big towns will soon be as bad. Germany will probably have 8½ million vehicles soon and Italy 4 million; many of the smaller European countries have traffic densities at least the equal of, and sometimes greater than, their bigger neighbours.

Far in excess of all of them, of course, is the United States, with the fantastic total of 80 million vehicles. The effects of this are, however, localised and in many areas one measures the number of square miles to the car and not the other way round. But the problem is no easier in the built-up areas where most of the population is concentrated, in fact, it is often much worse. Los Angeles, and similar towns, stand as terrible warnings of what the unrestrained advance of the motor car can do to man and his way of life.

At the same time, the car manufacturers of the world are busily expanding output, installing new plant, going in for more and more automation, opening up new factories. Spurred on by state financial aid and other encouragement, Ford go to Liverpool, Rootes to Linwood, Citroen to Rennes, Renault to Caen and Le Havre, Volkswagen to Emden; so linked has the motor industry become to the general health of modern capitalism that governments hardly dare interfere to control its booms and fall over themselves to stimulate it out of its slumps.

Whole industries have become its subsidiaries. Sheet steel and rubber are its hangers-on, petroleum pays it homage. It feeds upon vast quantities of glass, paint, plastics, chrome, and electrical equipment; it requires huge investment in heavy plant and machine tools. When the internal combustion engine misfires, the whole of capitalism begins to cough; when it is turning over well, the economy feels buoyant.

So far the motor vehicle has carried all before it. But the problem now threatening capitalism and its governments is how to reconcile this ever-increasing production with the need to keep the products on the move. Even its die-hard supporters can see the absurdity of turning loose hundreds of thousands of additional cars on to roads where the traffic already can hardly turn. Yet capitalism is on the horns of a real dilemma—how to impose restrictions on the car (which to be effective will need to be drastic) without disastrous repercussions on the industry itself.

Capitalism's Sacred Cow

In spite of all the evils and inconveniences it has brought in the way of noise, noxious fumes, dirt, nervous frustration, congestion, economic waste, death and injury from accidents, the car has so far had things pretty much its own way. It has become capitalism’s sacred cow, which nobody has been allowed to hinder or harm. Over the years it has steadily been allowed to reduce the public transport services to a joke and a travesty, and nobody has dared raise a hand to stop it.

The United States has always believed itself to be a step ahead of the motor vehicle (in contrast to this country which has always been a step behind it), but the net result, in the towns, at any rate, has not been very different. Driving magnificent motorways into the towns seemed a wonderful idea at the time, but all they did was to attract even more traffic and congest the centres still further. In the interests of the car, the Americans have assassinated their towns as decent, pleasant places to live in. Los Angeles has spread itself into a vast, inhuman sprawl over thousands of square miles; only now, after spending thousands of millions of dollars on super highways is it belatedly trying to put right its mistake with a new public transport system.

In this country and most of Western Europe the crunch has still to come, but it is not very far away. After the meters come the devices for charging for using road space—all very ingenious but a wonderful example of the fundamental idiocy of capitalism. The Buchanan report puts forward all sorts of inspiring ideas but one of the first very mundane things Mr. Marples is going to use it for is to provide independent weighty backing to his plans for restriction.

We referred to the idiocy of capitalism and it is true. Hundreds of thousands of cars, each taking up about 70 square feet of road space to carry seldom more than one passenger, crawl into our cities between certain fixed times in the morning, and crawl out again at another fixed period in the evening. It is only matched in idiocy by the way in which the urban public transport systems are geared to millions of commuters doing the same thing by bus, train, and tube. Many of these same commuters have themselves left a car in the garage taking up useful space at home or littering the streets, a car which they probably never take out on a journey worthy of the name more than once a week, plus the fine week-ends in the summer when they sally forth en masse to join the traffic jams, and the annual holiday when they often meet the same thing. The situation certainly has its ironies, as well. It is hardly more than ten to fifteen years ago that no Socialist meeting could go its allotted span without some questioner asking “And what are you going to do if everybody wants a motor-car under Socialism?," the implication being that there would never be enough to go round and matters would end in a mad free-for-all. How far away those days seem now! Today we are hardly asked the question—nobody questions that production will be a problem.

Capitalism itself has in fact already solved the problem of the production of the motor-car. Its real problem today is how to cope with what it has produced; how to reconcile social production with individual ownership. Its politicians, its experts, its planners, all accept without question that whatever else may happen the cars must still come rolling off the assembly lines in their millions. The Buchanan report puts forward the most grandiose schemes, all to deal with 13 million cars by 1970 and even 20 million by 1980; a BBC discussion on the report mentioned a figure of £9,000 million for town rebuilding alone and everybody seemed to think that that was quite normal to allow half a nation of car-drivers to go from one side of a town to the other or to stop half way through to do the shopping. And as for the really revolutionary suggestion—the one that would operate under Socialism—that perhaps we already had enough cars and that all that was necessary was for them to be utilised sensibly as a supplementary to a comfortable, convenient and generally well-run public transport service, this side of the equation was obviously not thought of, let alone considered.

The fact is that the cars will continue to roll from the assembly lines but that capitalism’s governments will do only so much to accommodate them as the necessities of private property will allow. Most of the Buchanan proposals, for example, will probably be quietly shelved; the government has already turned a cold eye on the suggestion that land for road schemes should be compulsorily acquired at a “reasonable price,” and hardly anybody believes that much of the drastic re-planning mentioned in the report will ever be realised.

What we shall probably get, as is usually the case, is a hotchpotch of a compromise that will ease the system where it is being pinched hardest with the rest left to look after itself as best it can. There will be restrictions in one form or another to keep the city centres reasonably free for commercial traffic and give essential services, such as getting the workers to work, more scope to operate. No doubt, also as usual, the wealthy will find ways round the permits and licences, and the charges will be chalked up with all their other odd financial items on the side against business expenses. Priority will also certainly be given to such things as motorways to carry capitalism's merchandise more quickly and thus more cheaply. But anything to do primarily with making our cities convenient and safe places to move about in, beautiful places to look at, and enjoyable places generally in which to live, will be well down the list of priorities. In other words, little is going to be done to rid us of the noise, the noxious fumes, the congestion, the waste of resources, the deaths and injuries, we mentioned earlier; indeed, they will probably become worse.

In short, we see little prospect of capitalism coping with the car, save perhaps in the sense that it will have to intervene to some extent to save itself from being strangled economically. And, to judge by the way it has been setting about the job so far, it looks as though it will not do even this too successfully either.

Where are you going? We may well ask. But wherever it is, or wherever you think it is, you're not going to find the car much of an asset.

Stan Hampson

One way to solve the traffic problem (1964)

From the April 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is always pleasant to see non-Socialists putting forward views in support of our case even though sometimes they go further than we ourselves are prepared to go.

In our special issue last January we discussed the motor car and how capitalism was incapable of coping with it. What it was unable to reconcile, we stated, was social production with individual ownership; the cars come rolling off the lines in millions to be used to a negligible extent by millions of individual owners. Perhaps, we suggested, society already had more than enough cars, and all that was necessary, as would be the case under Socialism, was for them to be used sensibly as a supplementary to a comfortable, convenient, and generally well run public transport system.

Now Dr. E. J. Mishan. Reader in Economics at the London School of Economics, has put forward proposals even more far-reaching. In the March issue of the F.B.I. Review, hardly a Socialist paper, he says:

  Indeed, the one radical alternative we should take a long look at before contemplating compromise solutions is that of a gradual but total abolition of all privately-owned motor cars.

Such a solution, he goes on to say, would point a much simpler and less expensive way to a sane and sensible pattern of living:

  For a small fraction of the money we are currently spending on the maintenance of private cars and on all the Government services necessary to keep the traffic moving—to say nothing of the enormous investments required to implement the Buchanan proposals—we could simultaneously achieve three socially desirable objectives:
  1. Provide a comfortable and highly efficient (and in the interests of amenity) preferably electrically powered public transport service, bus and train, in all major population areas;
  2. Through Government control of public transport to restrain and perhaps reverse the spread of population that has followed in the wake of post-war speculative building which has done so much to ruin the beauty of the countryside; and
  3. To restore quiet and dignity to our cities and to enable people to wander unobstructed and enjoy once more the charm of historic towns and villages.
  Motorised freight should be minimised, substituting as far as possible the use of railways in built-up areas.
  London's underground, for instance, could be adapted to carry freight loads during the small hours, with shop deliveries taking place when people were off the streets.

But Dr. Mishan, like Professor Buchanan, reveals himself as yet another idealist. All that he suggests, however sensible and desirable it may be, hasn’t the slightest chance of coming about while capitalism lasts. He talks of his proposal “being worthy of consideration in a nation that prides itself on its political maturity”; unfortunately for him, the greater part of the nation are not politically mature. If they were, they would no longer tolerate a system of society based on the profit motive and on the belief that everything must be subservient to it.

The great majority support such a system. They think it right and normal for the wealth of the world to be produced primarily for sale at a profit, to be owned individually and used individually. The idea of giving up their private motor cars is as far from their minds as is the idea of Socialism itself; Dr. Mishan is yet another, therefore, who sees clearly where reason and common sense lie yet fails to see that the particular problem he is concerned with is only part of a wider issue — the issue of Socialism versus capitalism.

Dr. Mishan is at least able to see some things free from the gloss of the shallow and the spurious which capitalism attaches to everything in the modern world. His aspirations are worthy ones —he seeks to “recapture the lost sense of community and citizenship, a more leisurely and dignified way of life" — but such aspirations are doomed to failure from the start in a framework of thought which accepts capitalism as eternal.

He talks of a radical alternative, but it is in fact nothing of the sort. The radical alternative is to get rid of capitalism and replace it by Socialism.

Stan Hampson

The Passing Show: Keep young and profitable (1964)

The Passing Show Column from the April 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keep young and profitable

It is not very pleasant to reflect that many of us, when we reach our sixties, face the prospect of life on an old age pension. Generally speaking, our productive powers will have declined to the point of unprofitability, and like so many worn out machines, we will be of only scrap value to the owners of the means of production. That is what it really means, despite the gallons of crocodile tears which capitalist politicians have spilled at election times over the plight of the aged.

Not that the politicians are necessarily callous by nature, but they are administering a system, and this system works by exploiting human beings. So it will look after its young a bit more because they are much more exploitable than the old. And if that means misery and hardship for old workers, well it is only part of the overall picture of misery and hardship anyway. And with a shrug of your mental shoulders you tell yourself that you are not going to lose much sleep over it. That's if you are a capitalist politician.

At the same time, you will never quite forget the question of the pensioners, but from another point of view. What a vast source of labour power would be here, if only they could be given a new lease of life—sort of reconditioned—for a few more years at least. Just think how the financial burden of pensions could be reduced, to say nothing of the prospects of increased profits.

So perhaps your pulse will have quickened with interest when you read the recent Evening Standard “KEEPING YOUNG SECRET UNVEILED.” Apparently there's this% London Doctor Tiberius Reiter, who has managed to find a synthetic copy of the key male hormone testosterone, which, when given to men in specially controlled dosage, gives them back some of their youthful vigour. The whole body is revitalised, it is claimed, by this chemical, and the doctor was sufficiently enthusiastic about it to tell findings to a joint meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Endocrinological Society.

No mention was made of the possible side-effects of this treatment. Maybe these will come to light later on, and perhaps then some of the enthusiasm for it will wane a little. Nevertheless, it is a sign of the times and if the capitalist class can see any prospect in it for widespread use, the chances are that they will give it their blessing. After all, the problem of a steadily ageing population has bothered them quite a lot in recent years.

Don't get us wrong, by the way. Good luck to you if you can get a spell of new vigour to your latter years. But don’t think that if this chemical is made widely available, it will be because your rulers feel sorry for you. Nothing is an unmixed blessing under capitalism.


Noise Problem

That may seem a sweeping statement to make, but a moment or two's reflection will show its truth. And why? Because the profit motive is the driving force behind production within capitalist society, and takes precedence over human interests. So problems linger on, not because they are physically incapable of solution, but because it would at present be too costly for the ruling class to tackle them. A glaring example is the growing health menace of noise. Its increase has been alarmingly rapid, and its effects on our nerves devastating, but those living near such places as busy main roads and airports are perhaps the worst afflicted.

It must have been a pretty frantic delegation of residents from the London Airport area which lobbied M.P.’s at the beginning of March, but for all the help they got their fare money would have been better spent buying earplugs. The noise from the airport is a round-the-clock evil now, with jets roaring low overhead at frequent intervals. Time was when night flights were a rarity, but such is the pace of competition between the airlines, that it has now become normal.

The MP’s were “sympathetic” of course but told the delegation that night flights must go on “for obvious economic reasons” and it would be “impractical” to demand blanket sound proofing in the area. ". . . I should think that everything human ingenuity can devise has been tried,” said the Conservative member for Brentford and Chiswick (Dudley Smith) inanely. Poor Mr. Broadbent, leader of the delegation, was not very happy at the results of the meeting; he could see that they were getting nowhere fast. “An absolute abomination” he called the noise level at night. Agreed, Mr. Broadbent. But so is the crazy system which has produced it, and frustrates your every effort to remove it.


No more slums

In about ten years time, we shall have got rid of most of the slums in Britain — according to Housing Minister Sir Keith Joseph. What’s that you say? You don't believe a word of it? Well, to tell you the truth, neither do we. Capitalist politicians have been making such statements for donkey's years. Duncan Sandys, for example, said in 1955 that the back of the problem would be broken in ten years, and similar thoughts were expressed in a government white paper in 1961. Then there was Labourite Ernest Bevin who astounded even his own supporters during the 1945 election by saying that the whole housing problem could be solved in two weeks under a Labour government.

Back in the days before the war, apparently, it was just as fashionable to be optimistic about slum clearance particularly if, like Health Minister Sir Hilton Young, you did not have to live in one. These were his words in 1934:—

  Twelve months hence the slums should be falling, according to present prospects, five times as fast, till the work reached its maximum speed two years hence. Five years was not an unduly long time to cure an evil which had been growing for a hundred. (Times 8/3/34).

Less than eighteen months later his successor, Sir Kingsley Wood, was hastening to assure us that:-

  So far as slum clearance is concerned, record progress was being made (Times 1/7/35).

which cheerfulness should be paired twenty-one years later with that of Mr. Duncan Sandys, thus: —

  I think things are going pretty well. The slum clearance drive is steadily gaining momentum. (Hansard 13/12/56).

We could add to these quotes many times over, but the point has been made and, we hope, taken. We are painfully aware that slums are still very much with us, despite all the speeches over the years, although it would be futile to blame the individual politicians concerned. This is just another of the monsters which capitalism has created, and which politicians are largely powerless even to contain, let alone destroy.

Eddie Critchfield

Let’s look at work (1964)

From the April 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we speak of work in the social or economic sense, we mean the expending of physical and mental energies upon means of production—either directly, in the creation of wealth, or indirectly in the distribution and administration which arise from production.

Because under capitalism the means of production belong to a minority, the capitalist class, work is earned out under the antagonistic relationship of employer to employee. Therefore, when the Socialist refers to members of the working-class as wage-slaves, he is sticking strictly to what is socially and economically accurate. Workers are compelled to seek out a member of the owning class, or someone who acts on his behalf, like a foreman, manager or state official, in order to offer for sale his physical and mental powers to work. These powers are part of his person and cannot be sold apart from him. The price, be it relatively high or low, which the worker obtains, is commonly referred to as wages. There are, unfortunately, many workers who find the acceptance of their class position distasteful and prefer to call their wages a salary. Such attitudes are skilfully pandered to by the capitalist class and by the politicians who shape their vote-catching accordingly. But they do not affect the facts of the situation one iota.

In order to wrest from nature the wherewithal to live, men have always had to work. Regardless of the claims made for electronics and automation, they will always have to do so. Nor is a situation wherein men did not have to work the least bit desirable. The great crime of capitalism is that it reduces the class that works to simply chasing pay-packets, so that money becomes the object of all social productive activities, and the work itself regarded as an evil necessity.

The idea of doing something useful and taking pleasure in doing it well, is something which survives only faintly, and against tremendous pressure. Capitalism, with its profit motive, so distorts and debases everything that people, for example, whose job it is to tell lies on television commercials are held in higher regard than road-sweepers.

We are taught that it is important to be successful. But here again, capitalism measures success in money terms. If one is an architect, one is successful. If one is a bricklayer, despite the mutual dependency of the two, success is somehow not thought to be a relevant term. To be a good carpenter has nothing to the social esteem that being a pop-singer has. Carpentry can be immensely interesting creative work, but here another aspect of capitalism comes in—the lack of fulfilment. It is the repetition and frustration in most people's lives under capitalism that gives pop-singers and such their exaggerated importance. They represent outlets—avenues of escape from a world which would otherwise drive more people mad than it already does. Even the carpenter has to use cheap materials and speed up his work because capitalism says, “time is money." What pleasure can he get from making hundreds of front doors out of battens and hardboard and filling the hollow with chippings?

It is a remarkable thing that workers in many industries, such as clothing, food and building, spend their lives producing the sham and the shoddy for themselves, and the expensive and luxurious for the wealthy. But despite the absurdity, few seem to notice it.

The answer is to be found in what passes for the “ideology’’ of capitalism. The worker is taught from the earliest age to keep his place and to regard himself as one of the lower orders whose good fortune it is to be allowed to work for an employer. The pulpit, the press, the schools and the state combine to persuade the worker that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” The employer is presented as a noble fellow, a veritable pillar of society whom we would all be lost without. He has got where he is through drive and enterprising zeal and if we work hard enough, and long enough, we too can rise to be captains of industry.

The capitalist class themselves find it necessary to devise a variety of means to make wage-slavery more acceptable. Having removed the pleasure from work and spread the notion that the only possible incentive is money, they have made work a drudge. Instead of workers willingly and happily doing something which they find interesting and can see to be useful, they largely resent the daily grind. It is common opinion that nobody really wants to work. Yet what is really objectionable is the oppressive conditions under which work is carried on. The time-clock, the army of foremen, music while you work, and the constant attempts to speed up, all testify to the antagonism between capitalist and worker. Although the existence of the class struggle is strenuously denied by the apologists of the system, we still find workers organised in trade unions, and employers in various associations, to wrangle interminably about the degree and conditions of exploitation.

The antagonistic relations of production will be abolished with the establishment of Socialism. The merchandising of human energies will end when the separation of the producers from the means of production is finished. The poverty and insecurity of the working-class is inseparable from the wages-system. Workers can be hired and fired according to the state of trade. When a slump comes along, the mass of unsaleable wealth coexists with the increased privation of the producers. Socialism means making the productive resources the common property of society. When people are socially equal there will be a real incentive to work. The only end in view will be the satisfaction of human needs. Money will no longer dominate our thoughts and actions. With the removal of capitalism from the world, all the dirty work of armaments, armies, navies and air-forces and the useless monotony of banking, insurance, and commercial advertising will disappear.

Harry Baldwin

Before and After (2019)

Book Review from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Protest: Stories of Resistance, edited by Ra Page  Comma Press £12.99.

Here is an interesting idea: twenty short stories, each dealing with an example of resistance and accompanied by an afterword. The stories range from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to the demonstration against the Iraq war in 2003, though most deal with the twentieth century. The afterwords are by a variety of authors, from historians to activists, and deal with various different issues. Most of the examples discussed are fairly well known, but some will be familiar to fewer people, such as the Radical War or Scottish Insurrection in 1820 and the National Blind March of 1920.

In his introduction, the editor notes that the stories are not about leaders or heroes but the ‘ordinary’ participants, about whom history usually has little to say. The only real exception is one scene dealing with a visit by Malcolm X to Smethwick in 1965, shortly before his assassination (this is based on a real event). A small amount is known about Andrew White, the central character in Laura Hird’s fine story of the Radical War: he was transported to Australia but later returned to Britain and probably became an active Chartist.

Three participants in that rising were executed, and state brutality is one aspect of the book. Michelle Green makes very vivid the trauma of suffragette prisoners being force-fed: the doctor ‘finds the gap … left by my treacherous missing tooth , and the steel jaws open with each turn of the screw, forcing bare the softness of my throat’. There were spies and agents provocateurs at Pentrich in 1817, and police violence at the Poll Tax demo in 1990.

A natural question to ask is how successful the various protests were. The Blind Persons Act of 1920, following from the March, did lead to improvements in the lives of blind people, and the repeal in 2003 of the notorious anti-gay Section 28 happened after a great deal of LGBT protest (though, as Em Temple-Malt says in her afterword, it probably also came after social attitudes had changed). At the end of Martyn Bedford’s story on the Miners’ Strike, one character says that the miners won, as you only lose if you don’t fight. But it is hard to see how the strike and the suffering and bitterness it caused resulted in success in any way.

Many of the stories emphasise the importance of co-operation and solidarity, but sadly also reveal how many struggles within capitalism do not deliver what was hoped for.

Paul Bennett

Reflections on the Tolpuddle Festival (2019)

Party News from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The festival, deep in the Dorset countryside, was held this year on the weekend of 20/21 July to remember the six farm labourers who in 1834 were convicted of swearing a secret oath as members of the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers (engaging in trade union activity), and sentenced to seven years penal transportation to Australia. We were represented at the event by our South West Regional Branch and whilst, unfortunately, our numbers were small we managed to make a fair impression at this well-attended event. However, examining most of the stalls on display made one realise that in general the task of our movement is a difficult one as the theme of reformism still dominated.

The Tolpuddle Festival has a trade union background so it is not surprising that most of the stalls are related to various campaigns and it is not unique compared to other similar events in that its basic message is reforming capitalism rather than replacing it. However, for those who have been involved in putting forward the case for socialism over a long period it is disappointing to see the same slogans and demands that we have been witnessing for so many years.

The stall opposite ours was the so-called Socialist Party, formally known as the Militant Tendency and now Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW). It was quite remarkable to gaze over at the amount of reforms they were advocating. Their various posters read; Tories Out – Fight the Cuts – Save the NHS. Alongside this they were attempting to get people to sign a petition calling for an early general election. This they obviously saw as a way of defeating the evil Boris Johnson. Whether or not their dreams of a humiliating defeat for Johnson and a glorious victory for Corbyn’s Labour Party would be the result of such an election is open to doubt, to say the least.

One of the participants at the SPEW stall had a UNITE trade union t-shirt pleading with Honda to remain in the UK. In addition to all of this they were selling or giving out Trump Out badges. How people displaying Trump Out badges in this part of the world is going to remove the President of the United States from office is rather beyond our comprehension. However, we could suggest many other candidates from various parts of the world for similar treatment, perhaps Putin or how about Bolsonaro the current President of Brazil who is overseeing the destruction of the Amazon where in the past year an area the size of 500,000 football fields have been destroyed, nearly half a billion trees have been torn down and entire indigenous communities are threatened with eviction from their lands?

The point, of course, is that the removal of individual leaders from office is not going to change the direction that world capitalism is leading us in. The only logical way to remove leaders is to stop following them. As a Trotskyist party SPEW believes that if they can con people into supporting such reforms they will become willing workers for their state capitalism revolution. Thankfully this strategy has failed to work so far and is unlikely to be successful now or in the future.

SPEW were not, by any means, the only reformist tendency on display. Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts were available, supporters of the Palestine cause had posters and shirts with the message Stop Arming Israel. But why, people might ask, stop at Israel? What about the bombing and other military action being inflicted on the populations of, for example, Yemen and Syria and of course you could name so many other areas of the world where a call could be made to impose a ban on the sales of military equipment. However well-meaning, the problem cannot be dealt with in such a piecemeal way. The only way to do away with the war-torn world that capitalism has created is to do away with its cause which is the system itself.

You could almost feel sympathy for Corbyn with the weight of expectation the Left in this country have been placing on him. To criticise the belief that a Corbyn Labour government, if elected, can really create a society which is ‘for the many, not the few’ is almost to commit heresy. There were some who visited our stall who posed questions on why we stood a candidate against Corbyn, or why we would not be urging people to vote Labour at the next election. The answer, in short, was that we are socialists and Corbyn and the Labour Party are not, as whoever their leader is their intention is to administer capitalism. A brief examination of political history, not just in this country, but around the world shows the reality that running a society based on minority ownership of the means of living alongside production for profit for the purpose of capital accumulation is at complete odds with the concept of a society ‘for the many not the few’. The latter can only be achieved by creating a majority world-wide movement whose sole purpose is to abolish capitalism as a world-wide system and establish a society which can operate for all its members in harmony with the planet we inhabit.

Of course it is very tempting to engage in reformist activity in the belief that solving particular problems is far easier than removing the system itself. However, just a glance at your TV screen during one of the many commercial breaks highlights the sheer volume of problems we would need to solve to create a world fit to live in. In most cases these issues are highlighted by various charities and involve damage inflicted on people, animals and the planet. But charities or attempts at reform have failed to make a dent. Today there are more charities in existence than ever before but the problems they aim to cure persist. The time has come, in reality it came some time ago, when we need to concentrate attention on the cause of the problems we face. Hopefully future years at events similar to the Tolpuddle Festival will begin to show signs that a large minority, at least, are coming round to a rejection of the reformist road and turning to a more radical perspective.

Ray Carr

Easy Rider: Remembering Peter Fonda (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transcript of a scene from the film in which Peter Fonda who died last month played Wyatt.

Billy: Oh, wow… what… What’s that, man. What the hell was that?

Wyatt: Huh?

Billy: No, man, like, hey man, wow! I was watching this object, man, like the satellite we saw the other night right and it was going across the sky, man, and then it just suddenly, yeah, it just changed direction and went whizzing right off, man. It flashed . . .

Wyatt: You’re stoned out of your mind, man.

Billy: Oh yeah, I’m stoned, man. But like, I saw a satellite, man, and it was going across the sky and it flashed three times at me and zigzagged and whizzed off, man, and I saw it.

George: That was a UFO beaming back at you. Me and Eric Heisman was down Mexico two weeks ago. We seen forty of them flying in formation. They’ve got bases all over the world now. They’ve been coming here ever since 1946 when the scientists started bouncing radar beams off of the moon. And they have been living and working among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about them.

Billy: What are you talking, man?

George: Well, you just seen one of them, didn’t you?

Billy: Hey man, I saw something, man, but I didn’t see it working here, you know what I mean.

George: Well, they are people just like us, from within our own solar system. Except that their society is more highly evolved. I mean, they don’t have no wars, they got no monetary system, they don’t have any leaders, because I mean each man is a leader. I mean each man . . . Because of their technology they are able to feed, clothe, house and transport themselves equally and with no effort.

Wyatt: Wow!

A Trouble-Saver for Communists (1936)

From the June 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the moment we are receiving a steady stream of letters from Communists and their sympathisers explaining why the case for joining the Labour Party is absolutely unanswerable. In 1929 the same people-were proving that it was absolutely necessary to oppose the Labour Party. In 1923 they proved why it was absolutely necessary to support the Labour Party. To save trouble when the Communist Party stands on its head (or its feet) at the next somersault, we print below brief extracts from their statements of policy of 1923 and 1929. 

From the Communist Party General Election Address, 1923: —

  Therefore our immediate object in the present struggle must be the establishment of a Labour Government. . . . Vote Labour and Communist. No Divided Ranks!

From the Communist Labour Monthly, January, 1929: —

  Until a comparatively recent period many revolutionary workers still believed in the possibility of a constitutional conquest of the Labour Party and its eventual transformation, as the workers became disillusioned in the reformist leadership, into a revolutionary party by a change of leadership . . . To-day, however, the facts are clear to all. The Labour Party is . . .  a machine of reformism, devised by reformism, for the control of the mass organisations, and which is prepared abundantly to protect itself against any danger of transformation. The decisive fight of the revolutionary workers is and can only be outside that machine and against it . . . The conception of a Socialistic transformation of the Labour Party needs to be denounced, not only as a Utopian dream, but as a reactionary deception and misleading of the workers, and passive support of MacDonald. With this goes equally the conception of the advance of the workers through a Labour Government, or a Left Labour Government, or Left pressure from within the Labour Party upon a Labour Government. The path of advance lies through the independent leadership of the revolutionary workers.

1936. (Same as (1923.)

193—?. (Same as 1929.)

P. S.