Some Cash Points (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scattered throughout the land, with the inconspicuous ubiquity of the beggars who are now everywhere, is a new form of life-support machine. They are to be found on every major street, sometimes several of them in a row. Staggering towards them, gasping for the machines, are endless streams of wretches who queue before the machine, like Muslims before Mecca. Cards in hands they stand - we stand, for you and I are there frequently - and appeal to the money machine, like robots in search of oil to keep them toiling.

In the face of the cash machine all claims to individuality collapse. “I AM A NUMBER” you remind yourself, as you tap in the four digits given to you by the bank to register your new identity. It is no use tapping in a stanza from Shelley, a line or two from Morrissey, an extract from your diary . . . The machine does not want to know who you are or how you feel, but simply how much money you want and how much money you arc allowed to have. It issues cold instructions: PRESS AMOUNT REQUIRED - WAIT - TAKE THE CARD - TAKE THE MONEY PROMPTLY . . . Missing you already!

That is the pleasant scenario. The cash machines have no obligation to deliver the dosh. Let us say

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

that a mother with two kids approaches The Machine, inserts her card and requests £30 so that she can buy enough to feed her children for the week. She has exceeded her overdraft. The Machine misses nothing. Request denied. There is no right to appeal on grounds of need: WITHDRAW YOUR CARD AND GO AWAY. Next in the queue stands a businessman who has made his fortune out of renting out slum properties to the poor. He is about to clinch a deal and proposes to withdraw £100 to pay for a decent business lunch. (Wine doesn’t come cheap in the decent restaurants, you know.) He inserts his card and The Machine, still angry at the audacity of the greedy mother and her excessive demands, pours out the twenty-quid notes, reassured that the world makes sense once more.

If you have no money you go without. In some countries you watch your babies slowly starve to death. In this country you face the indignities, discomforts and insecurities of scraping by with needs greater than you have money. There is no greater symbol of alienation than money. It tramples on our freedoms and desires, crushing hope in the impoverished and lavishing endless powers upon the extremely rich. The cash machine is symptom, not cause of this state of affairs. It is an inanimate player in a cruel game. The man who was seen some weeks ago in Camden Town kicking the wall containing the cash machine of the Royal Bank of Scotland made no impact upon the system which made him poor. (Even as a gesture of mere anti-Scots nationalism it would have been impotent.) Had he smashed open the machine and strangled it with its own thinly-wired innards The Tyranny of Money would have been dented no more than by the knocking-off of a policeman’s hat during an anti-war demonstration. The machine has built-in resilience.

Some months ago in a Budgen supermarket a woman presented her goods at the till, was given her bill and then presented her Visa card to the cashier. The card was inserted into the machine and, within seconds, popped out with the word VOID appearing in the appropriate slot. Her card was not accepted the cashier asked for cash. The woman had none. She looked around her, perhaps hoping that one of us in the neighbouring queue would pull out their wallet and act the Samaritan rather than shuffle the coins in our pockets and feel sorry for her. She burst into tears and left without the shopping. An unpurchased cabbage stood as a monument to her poverty. Did she go home and curse Budgen or the Tories or the blacks or the Jews . . . or maybe join the suicide statistics . . .  or maybe, like me and like you, accommodate herself to the sickly rituals of spending within her means? We can be sure that the credit-card machine lost no sleep over the drama. It is just a machine, and the cashiers, the managers, the accountants and producers of goods merely appendages to the machine.

In the Little Chef restaurant on the M1 the waiters plug themselves into the cash till before taking our money. It is apparently a security measure to ensure that the appendage pays sufficient homage to the machine. It is hard to think of a more symbolic image of the alienating bondage of money fetishism than a grown man plugging himself into a money machine.

Steve Coleman

Taking care of number one (1996)

Theatre Review from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brothers of the Brush by Jimmy Murphy (Arts Theatre)

Capitalism brutalises human relationships. Politicians are right when they talk about the importance of 'competing with economic opponents’ and 'the struggle to survive’. The dynamics of capitalism sets class against class, pits country against country and individuals against one another.

The fortune tellers of capitalist economics argue that those who survive the vicious culling of the work force as companies struggle to reduce costs, feel powerful and empowered. Analysts report, however, that the facts are rather different: that the survivors are frequently inhibited by uncertainty and riddled with guilt.

In Brothers of the Brush, a new play by Jimmy Murphy, at the Arts Theatre, the corrosive impact of the black economy on working relationships is examined with an authentic blend of humour and merciless honesty. Four flawed but decent men fell victim of exploitation and the power games of management and unions, with predictable and tragic results.

Here is a play of rare passion and skill, with dialogue as sharp and convincing as anything currently available in London. Murphy chillingly demonstrates that morality is determined by the inexorable laws of economics, and that in the dog eat dog world of capitalist economics the niceties of social behaviour are frequently a victim of the need to survive.

Writing about his play Murphy observes that "In the black economy unions are as redundant as the workforce they once represented, old alliances are spurned, ideologies discarded, a new creed is the order of the day, look after number one".

But looking after number one - whether it be class, group or individual - is at the very heart of capitalism. Murphy’s unsentimental, vivid and serious drama is in feet an unflinching attack on the barbarisms of employment

After the burdens of watching two pieces of pretentious, bourgeois drama on recent visits to the theatre, Murphy’s play is like a douche of cold, refreshing water. This is a play about real people feeing real dilemmas. It is beautifully constructed, poignant piece of theatre. If you can’t catch it in London do look out for it when it is produced locally. Thoroughly recommended.

Michael Gill

Being Dumped (2012)

Book Review from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts, Faber and Faber, £9.99

Don’t judge a book by its cover – or by its title. This is actually a well-researched investigation of the environmental crisis in China based on visits to many different parts of the country.

Western companies have outsourced a great deal of manufacturing to China, from iPods to shoes and toys. In addition, a lot of waste from production in the West is sent to China: ‘It was cheaper to send a container of waste from London to Guangdong on an otherwise empty ship than it was to truck it to Manchester.’Computers and mobile phones (e-garbage) are transported to China, and dangerous chemicals extracted from them.

One town, Qiaotouin Zhejiang province, has become the world centre of zip and button production. Making zips islabour-intensive and requires relatively little by way of capital investment, but, at least when practiced without proper environmental controls, it is highly polluting, and on some days flakes of white plastic fill the Qiaotou air.

It is fairly well known that working as a coal miner in China is extremely dangerous, with a death rate pertonnemined thirty times that in the US. This is partly because the economy depends greatly on coal for almost 70 percent of its energy needs. Hydroelectric plants may be cleaner in theory, but they tend to attract dirty factories in their vicinity and coal-fired power stations, too, which provide electricity in the dry season, something dams cannot do. President Hu Jintao is a hydro engineer, and the company he used to work for is now the world’s biggest dam-building corporation. 

It is not just a matter of dirty industries being moved from the West to Japan and Taiwan and then to China, for within China they are increasingly being shifted from the coastal areas to more remote inland provinces where environmental regulations are even laxer and local politicians are keen on ‘development’at almost any cost.

It’s little wonder that even other capitalist countries are becoming concerned at China’s record on the environment: it contributes massively to polluting the globe and enables Chinese capitalists to undercut many Western companies.

Paul Bennett

Anarchist history (1998)

Book Review from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spanish Anarchists. The Heroic years 1868-1936 by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. £13.95.

This is a reprint, with a new introduction, of a history of anarchism Spain until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 that first appeared in 1976.

Spain was the one European country where the organised working-class movement embraced anarchism rather than Social Democracy as its ideology. Bookchin traces the historical reasons for this. One was that everywhere the workers' movement emerged out of the leftwing of the bourgeois radical movement and in Spain the bourgeois radicals were Federalists, i.e. wanted a constitution for Spain similar to that in Switzerland where power would rest with cantons rather than with a central state.

Anarchist ideas were introduced into Spain at the end of the 1860s by the followers of Bakunin within the First International. Contrary to the myth cultivated by anarchists, the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within this organisation was not between an authoritarian Marx and a libertarian Bakunin but between a Marx who saw the workers' movement as an open democratic movement and Bakunin who advocated that it should be directed behind the scenes by a secret society of dedicated revolutionaries. Bakunin was booted out of the First International not for being a libertarian but for being a proto-Leninist vanguardist. Even Bookchin, who writes as an anarchist, is compelled by the facts to concede:

"Bakunin's 'International Brotherhood' has been dealt with derision as a hierarchical, elitist organization which stands in blatant contradiction to his libertarian principles. This contradiction in my view is very real. Bakunin had intended the 'International Brotherhood' to be a secret organization of Anarchist militants, led in tightly disciplined fashion by a highly centralized group of initiates—indeed, by what amounted to a revolutionary general staff" (p. 41).

This idea that revolutionaries should organise as a masonic-type secret society was another bourgeois-revolutionary tradition inherited by Spanish anarchists which lasted right down to the 1930s when the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) infiltrated and came to control the syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labour) which had been set up by militant trade unionists in 1911.

The CNT was not an anarchist body but anarchists had an input in its organisation and ideology. As a result the CNT adopted as its long-term aim "libertarian communism" rather than state-capitalist nationalisation as elsewhere in Europe. This did allow it to avoid the mistakes made by trade unionists elsewhere of supporting and even sponsoring parties that stood for state capitalism, but it was only a long-term aim and in practice the CNT acted as a militant trade union seeking immediate improvements for workers within capitalism.

The FAI—which was essentially a secret anarchist terrorist organisation set up in 1927 under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship—regarded this as reformism and sought to use the CNT in its plans for insurrection. This met resistance from within the ranks of the CNT by trade unionists who, according to Bookchin's account, seem to have had a better grasp of reality:

"Not only did the CNT lack the support of a majority of the Spanish people, they argued, but it lacked the support of the majority of the Spanish working class. Anarchosyndicalists were a minority within a minority. Even within the CNT membership, a large number of workers and peasants shared only a nominal allegiance to libertarian ideals. They were members of the CNT because the union was strong in their localities and work places. If these people, and the Spaniards generally, were not educated in Anarchist principles, warned the moderates, the revolution would simply degenerate into an abhorrent dictatorship of ideologues" (p. 193).

The FAI brushed such objections aside and in 1931 succeeded in capturing the CNT and, applying classic Bakuninist tactics, in Bookchin's words, "dragged" the CNT into a number of "insurrectionary adventures". The results were disastrous. Not only were hundreds of workers' lives sacrificed but the CNT split. In fact, reading Bookchin's account the thought springs to mind that the disaster that was to befall the Spanish working class might have had a chance of being avoided if the anarchist vanguardists of the FAI had left the CNT alone.

Even Bookchin questions whether an "anarchist revolution" could have been sustained in Spain in 1936. Certainly, the workers showed that they could take over and run the factories and the peasants that they could take over and cultivate the land without capitalists and landlords but, Bookchin asks, could it have lasted:

"But what would happen when everyday life began to feel the pinch of economic want of the material problems imposed not only by the Civil War but by Spain's narrow technological base? 'Communism will be the result of abundance,' Santillan had warned in the spring of 1936, 'without which it will remain only an ideal'. Could the ardor of the CNT and FAI surmount the obstacles of scarcity and material want in the basic necessities of life, obstacles that had limited the forward thrust of earlier revolutions?" (p. 284).

Bookchin only hints at a negative answer, but in the event the matter was not tested. The "anarchist revolution" was first stopped by the Republican government with the Stalinist "Communists" in the lead and then savagely crushed by the Franco fascists.

Adam Buick

The abolition of money (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

At first it is hard to envisage a world without money. It requires a considerable jump of the political imagination to think of life without banks, wallets, coins, bills, cheque books or financial worries. From birth to the grave, workers’ lives are conditioned by money. Without it we starve; because of it we are poor; to get it we are forced into wage slavery; if we steal it we can be locked away; people grow old before their time because of it.

In Robert Tressell's classic socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the socialist, Owen, explained to his workmates the nature of money:

“Let us begin at the beginning”, continued Owen . . .“First of all, what do you mean by Poverty?”
“Why, if you’ve got no money, of course,” said Crass impatiently.
The others laughed disdainfully. It seemed to them such a foolish question.
“Well, that’s true enough as far as it goes,” returned Owen, “that is, as things are arranged in the world at the present. But money itself is not wealth: it’s of no use whatever.”
At this there was another outburst of jeering laughter.
“Supposing for example that you and Harlow were shipwrecked on a desolate island, and you saved nothing from the wreck but a bag containing a thousand sovereigns, and he had a tin of biscuits and a bottle of water.” “Make it beer,” cried Harlow appealingly.
"Who would be the richer man, you or Harlow?” (p. 29)

In short, it is not money as such which can satisfy needs, but money as a medium of exchange. According to Owen, "Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour” (p. 209). The significant point is that Tressell (or Robert Noonan, as he was really called) was not considered strange for making his socialist character advocate the abolition of the monetary system. At the turn of the century, when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed, socialists were frequently heard advocating a moneyless society. After all, how could one logically speak about a system of common ownership without referring to its logical consequences?

These days, those who pose as socialists, but in fact have no other purpose than to reform the capitalist system, are never heard to refer to the abolition of money. Benn, the SWP, the Communist Party and Co. are all united in their dismissal of the possibility of a moneyless society. The celebrated Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution states its aim as “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The illogicality of such an objective betrays the Labour Party’s profound confusion about the nature of socialism: if resources are commonly owned, who is going to need money to buy anything and who will be selling it? The abolition of all property and the introduction of common ownership necessarily does away with the anachronistic social relationships of buying and selling. The confusion of the Communist Party of Great Britain is clearly demonstrated in its pamphlet. Time to Change Course; in the section headed “Where Will The Money Come From?” (p. 81), we are told about financing socialism:

Under socialism, with all the main industries, land, resources and financial houses publicly owned, it is from these sources that the main forms of revenue will be derived. Personal taxation will be simple and not too arduous for the majority of people. Indirect taxation would be kept to a minimum. The present rating system would go. Local authorities would rely on other steps to raise local revenue.

Clearly, the Communist Party has failed to liberate itself from the ideological assumptions of the money system. Its members would do well to read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in which he states that Communists (or socialists) stand for “the abolition of buying and selling”. This revolutionary objective is a hallmark of any principled socialist. Anyone claiming to stand for socialism who rejects the need for a society without money (or the possibility of attaining it) is not a socialist and should be treated as an opponent.

Great ideas are of social origin and never the product of just one brain. In the months before Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published in English (in November 1850), a number of workers in Britain were discussing the idea of abolishing money. The correspondence on the subject, which appeared in the Chartist journal, The Red Republican, has never before been seriously examined by historians. Presumably, most of them have dismissed the correspondence as an insignificant exchange of views between harmless economic eccentrics; in fact, it is a highly significant discussion, showing that there were workers discussing the case for a moneyless society before the Socialist Party of Great Britain began to advocate it.

The first letter, from George Smith of Salford, was published in The Red Republican on 27 July 1850, under the heading “ABOLITION OF MONEY”. He argues that

. . . in order . . . to prepare the way for the absolute supremacy of the working classes, preparatory to the abolition of the system of classes, what should be done? Evidently something more than getting possession of political rights, or even destroying those twin monsters, rent and usury; for had we possession of the one and had successfully destroyed the other, there would yet remain in existence a monster which would reproduce its kind to torment humanity; and that monster is money! Sir, in my opinion, so long as mankind will agree to have a circulating medium — will allow everything in life to be measured by money — so long will they suffer the evil consequences springing therefrom . . .

By 10 August, Smith’s letter had provoked a response. The writer, who signed himself “A Wage Slave”, opposes the need to abolish money, stating that “What society wants is just social institutions”. He argued that capitalism survives because workers are not paid the full value of their labour power and that the real need is for an equitable distribution of money. (The modern Left, one hundred and thirty years later, has not advanced beyond such theoretical fallacies.)

The Red Republican of 24 August contains two letters on the money question, taking up three columns. The first is from RPP, who states that the abolition of money “is the most important subject for discussion at the present time”. He goes on to agree that money should be abolished:

I would root out and abolish a system that compels man to give the sweat of his heart’s blood to the great money-mongers, wasting his own time, strength and happiness, as wealth may command. It is the slavery of the many for the sake of the few. Such a state of things must no longer exist, for man was made to enjoy all things equally with his fellow-man.

But — just as the reader is thinking that the correspondent has hit the nail very close to its head — RPP proceeds to argue that “the working classes must return to barter”. The second letter is from George Smith, who initiated the correspondence, and contains some excellent answers to the arguments of “Wage Slave”:

Strange, that in the 19th century, any wage slave should be found to advocate the continuance, in any shape, of that which, whilst it shall last, must perpetuate his vassalage, to its “fortunate possessors”. Does not my friend see both the craft and the hellishness of money? Who produces everything which sustains life, and feeds our desires for luxuries? The workers! Through the instrumentality of their labour, and by no other means can these things be produced. Then by what chicanery do those who “work not, neither do they spin” obtain all they want to superfluity, whilst those who produce are kept almost without? Why, by the crafty invention and use of money, with which they, like true “philanthropists”, come to the producer, and assure him that the food he is taking home is not “the stuff of life” but that which they will give him in return for his food is the real sustainer of existence, and thus he is cheated out of his produce for a shadow.

Smith rather confuses cause and effect — it is not money which produces class division, but the other way round — but nevertheless he is clearly moving in the direction of the ideas later to be elaborated by Marx. Responding to “Wage Slave’s” advocacy of a “just commercial system”, Smith rightly states that:

For a man to dispose (or sell) of his labour at the “public mart” presupposes a buyer of that labour, and, according to our friend’s just commercial system, I am afraid that no buyers would purchase unless they could live out of such purchases. To live by buying and selling is to live nefariously.

“Wage Slave” replies on 7 September, stating that he can now see the importance of Smith’s idea, but doubts whether everyone else will be intelligent enough to live in a moneyless society. (A familiar argument from modern Leftists.) “Why propose to do that which is impossible at the present time?” asks “Wage Slave”. This question was asked of the SPGB when it was formed in 1904 and it was for this reason that our members were labelled “the impossibilists”. If those who took this view in 1850 and 1904 had spent less time running away from the need to convince people of a good idea, and telling its advocates that they were wasting their time, we would have achieved the seemingly impossible long ago.

On 14 September Alexander Bill contributed a letter to the correspondence, in which he argued (rather confusedly) that he was opposed to “the total and unconditional abolition of money”, although he did agree with Smith “when he says that our present monetary system is the basis of all those social evils under which we labour”. His answer was to introduce a “prohibition of private trading” and “the establishment of public marts”. Effectively, this was an argument for state capitalism.

The final letter on the subject was published on 28 September and came from George Smith. To “Wage Slave’s” claim that workers could not arrive at the point of intelligence which would make a moneyless society possible, Smith responds:

Intelligence! What is it? Walker says intelligence is “perception, understanding”. Now, will my friend say that it is impossible for the intelligent to excite the perception of the, at present, ignorant, and give them understanding?

No further letter appeared on the subject. Smith’s question remained unanswered. But since 1850, the post-Chartist Left has responded to the question in the negative. While claiming to be fully committed Marxists, they refuse to advocate the case for the abolition of money because they consider the working class too stupified by capitalist conservatism ever to accept or understand it. Instead, they argue in favour of state capitalism. It is because of this that socialists are fundamentally hostile to the left-wing parties and groups.

Genuine socialists stand for a society in which all factories, farms, offices, docks, mines — indeed, the entire means of producing and distributing wealth — will be owned by the entire world community. The resources of the earth will belong to everyone. No laws will exist to preserve the right of one section of society to use things and another section to be denied the use of them. World socialism will be a social order based on free access for all people to all the goods of the earth. In such a society money would by an out-dated relic. Nobody will buy anything or sell anything or pay for anything. Those who cannot easily imagine such an arrangement should remember that people in pre-capitalist societies would have found our present social order equally difficult to comprehend. Those who have made the mental leap from the prison of the money system to the freedom of world socialism are urged to join us now in our struggle to create the society of tomorrow. The objective is urgent; we have waited for too long.

Steve Coleman

Material World: Give Us the Vote (2016)

The Material World column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right to vote matters little if you can’t cast your vote. On the basis of its claim to be defenders of democracy one would expect the United States of America to be in the forefront of encouraging participation in the electoral process since voting is held up as the foundation of democracy. Over 100 million Americans will cast a ballot in November’s presidential election but many will face disenfranchisement — those without IDs, those convicted of crimes, those that need to work, those that can't find childcare, those that can't travel, and often this disenfranchisement is deliberate. In 2008, the Supreme Court opened the door to more restrictive voting procedures when it upheld an Indiana law that required all voters casting a ballot in person to present a federal or Indiana photo ID. Since 2010, many other states have either introduced restrictive voter procedures or tightened up those in operation. Events are, of course, currently unfolding as legal challenges are being made to restrictive laws.

The American Civil Liberties Union noted that new restrictions on voting will affect up to 80 million and critics argue that photo ID laws create a financial barrier to the ballot box. Former Attorney General Eric Holder compared the laws to a poll tax during the ‘Jim Crow Era’ when Southern states imposed voting fees, to discourage blacks from voting. About 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don’t have government-issued photo ID and many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome. While many states with strict laws offer a free state ID, these require documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25. Researchers found that states with a strict photo ID law saw a significant decrease in turnout among minority and immigrant voters and an increased gap between white and non-white voters.

Some states are also trimming back or eliminating measures which bolster electoral participation by minority and younger voters. Eight states have enacted new laws cutting back on early voting days and hours.  In 2013, North Carolina reduced early voting days from 17 to 10, ended the ability to register and cast a vote on the same day and abolished a pre-registration programme for 16- and 17-year-olds. But one of the major barriers to universal suffrage is the disenfranchisement of ex-prisoners.

The Constitution permits states to adopt rules about disenfranchisement ‘for participation in rebellion, or other crime’ [our emphasis], by the Fourteenth Amendment. Individual states themselves decide which crimes could be grounds for disenfranchisement so laws vary from state to state. There were 1.2 million in 1976 denied the right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement. In 2008 over 5.3 million people. Nationally in 2012, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the vote because of laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions.

Due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, this has resulted in one in every thirteen African Americans unable to vote. The disenfranchisement of felons was used by Southern states combined with other tactics to neutralise the black electorate, in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ostensibly guaranteed African Americans the vote. A study found that the larger the state’s black population, the more likely the state was to pass the most stringent laws that permanently denied people convicted of crimes the right to vote. In three states (Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia) by 2014, more than one in five black adults were disenfranchised. Very different from Maine and Vermont where there is no significant black population and who have placed no restrictions on voting rights for people convicted and actually allow inmates to vote from prison (something the UK still doesn’t.)

Felony disenfranchisement is an obstacle to participation in civic life. Conditions have improved for at least 200,000 Virginian ex-felons who have served their time and had their right to vote restored by the Governor. He explained, ‘These individuals have completed their sentences. They have atoned for their actions. They live, work and raise families in communities all across the commonwealth, and they will continue to contribute to our communities, but they now will do it with the full rights of citizens.’

The socialist position upon all this is that we can fully expect sections of the ruling class to gerrymander elections to protect their interests but as long as the system is sufficiently democratic to provide a mandate from the majority and reflect the will of the majority then we will make use of what exists, warts and all.

ALJO

Editorial: Heralding 1984 (1958)

Editorial from the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Daily Herald, early in January, ran a series of articles by “experts” to answer the question whether 25 years ahead we shall be living in George Orwell’s nightmare, “with common man enslaved by the State” or will 1984 “be a year of dazzling brilliance of scientific promise—with common man enjoying the new fruits of the earth?” (Daily Herald, 6/1/58). Sir Miles Thomas foresees that travel will be faster, cheaper and safer. Sir Adolphe Abrahams does not think we shall have the 3½ minute mile; but football will still be the top national game, we shall still have the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Cup Final will still be at Wembley. Jane Drew, “leading woman architect” thinks houses and streets will be more attractive, houses won’t be cold, and the “the TV set will take the place of the fireplace as the centre of the family circle.”

The Anti-Utopia Builders

Now the Herald is the organ of the Labour Party and claims to be socialist and the reader might well have expected to be told that 1984 would have seen the introduction of Socialism. The articles did not say that Socialism would be here or that it wouldn’t be here— the subject was just not mentioned. Several of the “experts” have either never heard of it at all, or, they think that it has nothing to do with their specialist subject; which goes to show just how little they know about Socialism.

In each of their supposedly isolated worlds the choice is between capitalism and socialism, there isn't any neutral no man's land. The kind of house you live in, the kind of vehicle you travel in and the kind of entertainment and sport you enjoy will depend on your position in society. If you are a wage-earner in a capitalist 1984 what you get will be what you can afford. All of this is a closed book to the Herald's writers and obviously doesn't have any importance for the Editor, or he would have directed his inquiries to the real question, whether Socialism will be here by then.

Capitalism, 1984 Variety

But one of the writers, Mr. Harry Nicholas, assistant secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, stands out from the rest, for he mentioned the word “socialist” His article, on the job situation, was the most deplorable of the lot. He answers the question very clearly, though without knowing he answers it. Capitalism it will be, with not a single essential feature altered. Not that Mr. Nicholas is pessimistic about it. He does not think “we will have any unemployment in the next 25 years, provided we have sanity in the financial sphere.” (He has clearly never examined the financial system if he thinks it isn't inherently idiotic). Automation, he says, will create jobs and markets. We shall be charitable and “in a good socialist way” we shall assist the backward countries and thus “create markets which will absorb the products of our industries” There will be fewer “'unskilled'” and more “skilled” workers, and higher standard rates of wages and less piecework. There will be more Company pension, sickness and other benefits to supplement the State schemes. Evidently Mr. Nicholas' optimism does not extend to the elimination of the wars that go with the struggle for markets. All he says in this field is that “because of the changes likely to take place in weapons of attack and defence, many of our Royal Ordnance factories and naval dockyards will have to be utilized for peacetime production.” He does not risk a forecast about the kind of weapons the other factories will be producing.

We may wind up by saying that while most of the contributions were useless, because the writers don't even know about the capitalist world we live in, Mr. Nicholas is pernicious as well because he has obviously heard about capitalism but sees no reason why or how or when it should be abolished: just like the Herald, and the Labour Party for which it speaks.

Capitalism, war and recession (1991)

Editorial from the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A famine threatens in Sudan and Ethiopia. But has a mass airlift of food, tents and medicines been organised? Has the production of useful things been increased to meet this obvious need? Not at all. The only airlift that has been organised is one of troops and armaments to the neighbouring Arabian peninsula in order to wage a hi-tech war. And manufacturing output in countries like Britain and the US is actually falling as their economies enter the recession phase of the business cycle.

Over the past ten years capitalism has had a comparatively good press. Words like profit, competition and enterprise have become catch-phrases to express something desirable. The desirability of what they denote is a matter of opinion but they do describe the key features of capitalism. Under capitalism economic activity is governed by a competitive struggle for profits amongst rival enterprises. Defenders of capitalism say this is good as it leads to more and cheaper goods being produced. We are now seeing what it also means: war and recession.

Under capitalism decisions as to what, how and when to produce are taken by firms which are all competing to make profits. A recession develops when this anarchic struggle for profits leads, after a period of expansion, to a key industry overproducing in relation to the market for its goods and this having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy. This is where we are now in Britain, the US and a growing number of other countries. Output, investment and market demand are falling while unemployment and bankruptcies are rising. It's the old story of poverty amidst plenty being solved by abolishing the plenty rather than using it to abolish poverty. But this is how it must be under capitalism, where the profit motive means that production is not and cannot be geared to meeting needs.

On the world scale the struggle for profits is not just a peaceful, economic struggle between rival firms from different states in which those selling the best product win. It is much more than this, since not just firms are involved. States are and, as states have armed force at their disposal, this gives the struggle a completely different dimension. When states feel that their "vital" economic interests are threatened by some other state, they are always prepared to use armed force as a last resort. This is the cause of modern wars, to which the present war is no exception.

This is why no conference of capitalist states, such as that proposed for the Middle East, can remove the threat of war. The most such a conference could do would be to negotiate a new balance of armed force, an armed truce between the states competing in the region. The only way to prevent wars is to abolish capitalism on a world scale.

What is required is indeed a "new world order", though not Bush’s mad dream of a permanent and unchallenged American world domination. Oil and all other productive resources must become the common heritage of all humanity, not the property of multi-national corporations and national states. Nothing less can provide the framework within which the problems of world poverty, disease and pollution can be tackled and finally solved. Only then can production be geared to meeting people’s needs. Only then can the obscenities of war and famine be banished for ever.

What is capitalism? (1978)

From the October 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is the form of society which (with only minor exceptions) exists throughout the world today. It is the system of society which is responsible for the major problems of the world but is incapable of solving those problems. Take one of the most basic of human requirements, housing. This is a problem that has been “about to be solved” over and over again. Yet, as is well-known, it remains. And when appalling slums are offered “cheap” to the workers, they fall over themselves in the rush to get at them. The GLC, for instance, have a policy of offering unusable property at very low rents to families who can’t get anything else. And of course those workers who could not afford other accommodation rushed in hundreds to try to get these miserable abodes. (See for example The Times 21/8/76). If there were no housing problem, workers would not be queuing up for slums.

But although workers are still facing similar problems to those of their parents and grand parents, the capitalist class, even in the midst of the current crisis, are doing quite well thank you. The Daily Mirror pointed out that although last year workers’ living standards were pushed down, “it was the rich wot got the pleasure. Profits and dividend payouts jumped by one sixth.” (8/4/78)

Now to the question: “What is this system that gives profits to the rich and slums to the poor — what is meant by the term “capitalism”? One thing can be stated with confidence; if workers want to do something about the problems that face them throughout the world it is necessary to have an understanding of how this society works, and why it cannot solve their problems.

Now it is true that capitalist society takes different forms in different parts of the world. Much depends on the level of development of any particular country. Detailed examination of, for example, the Russian system will reveal many differences from the form of capitalism in the USA. Nevertheless, all forms of capitalism, no matter how diverse, exhibit the following five basic characteristics:

1) Property

Society is based on property. This means that it is recognised (almost inevitably via a complex legal process) that individuals, groups or the state own wealth, in whatever physical form wealth takes. The converse of this is that it is also recognised that other individuals or groups do not own wealth.

2) Commodities

Society produces what are called “commodities”; that is, the need of the class that owns wealth to for exchange or sale. The production of commodities is of course much older than capitalism. In previous forms of society, though, the production of commodities for sale was a relatively minor aspect of wealth production. Under capitalism it is the major social form. In previous forms of society commodity production existed as a small part of the social structure. Today the social structure exists as a huge machine for the production of commodities.

3) Profits

Profits are realised when commodities are sold. That is, a surplus is received by certain sections of society. This surplus is something that is derived from the following simplified process: The majority of people (the workers) sell their working ability (known as “labour-power”) to the minority of people (the capitalists) approximately at its value; that is, at its cost of production and reproduction. Because of the special quality of this labour-power when it takes part in the production process, it produces both its cost of production and reproduction and something over. But when the worker sells his labour-power to the capitalist, he receives as wages from the capitalist only his cost of production and reproduction— what it cost (roughly speaking of course) to produce the worker and keep him fit for production. The “something over”, the balance, is kept by the capitalist. The extra which the worker has added is, in general terms, the source of all profit.

4) Accumulation

The driving force of the system is accumulation; that is, the need of the class that owns wealth to increase the wealth they own. As Marx put it, in a well known phrase: “Accumulate, accumulate. That is Moses and the prophets.” The ability of the capitalists to accumulate comes from the profits produced by the workers being used by the capitalists to increase the production of commodities to allow for the possibility of further profits.

5) Classes

Society is divided into classes. Those individuals who own wealth constitute one class; that is, they are a group of people with the same economic interest, the receipt of profits. They are the buyers of labour- power. The rest, the propertyless class, are the workers; they are the sellers of labour-power. They live off wages, the price of labour-power. The economic factor that binds them as a class, a group with a common economic interest, is the receipt of wages. They are what Marx called the “free” class. That is they are free from property; they have no property (or none of any social significance). And they are also free in a second sense that they are freely available for sale to the highest bidder on the labour market.

It is this system of society which is now responsible for the major problems in the world. Paradoxically, it is this system that enables the potential solution to the problems of the world to be developed. It is this system of society that needs replacing with Socialism.

Ronnie Warrington

Here’s to Success! (2006)

From the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you think everyone has an equal chance of success in life? That whatever family circumstances you were born into make little or no difference to the prospect of your getting on in the world? If so, think again. Danny Dorling, a Professor of Human Geography, was interviewed in the Guardian of 8 February. Where you are born, he claims, is the main thing that determines your status, health and wealth in later life. And by the end of your first two decades, your future is mostly decided:

‘By 18 or 20 your life is largely mapped out for you. You’ll either have interesting jobs where you use your mind your whole life, or your life will be working in a servile occupation.’

In addition, inequality in Britain has increased: in 2000, the wealthiest 1 percent owned 23 percent of the wealth, compared to 18 percent in 1990.

This is all very well, and certainly Dorling’s website at http://www.worldmapper.org is worth a look. But Socialists have news for the good professor: what determines your standard of living, your control over your life, etc. is which of the two main classes you belong to. The overwhelming majority of people are members of the working class: selling their mental or physical abilities for a wage or salary (or else depending on another family member who does so). A small minority are members of the capitalist class: they own enough property, whether in the form of land or shares, so that they do not need to work for a living. The contrast between interesting jobs and servile occupations is a division within the working class. The capitalists, as millionaires and billionaires, do not have to get a job — though they often have some cushy number with a title such as Managing Director or Chair of the Board, where they make sure that the interests of shareholders in a company are being looked after properly.

These classes are not castes: it’s certainly possible for a person to move from one to another. Members of the working class do occasionally become capitalists, largely through a sizeable slice of luck. But in almost all cases, the class you are born into determines whether you will grow up as an exploiter or a wage slave. So, if ‘where you are born’ determines how your life will pan out, that has to be seen as a matter of class, not of geography.

Paul Bennett

Obituary: Bob Miller (2004)

Obituaries from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bob Miller

Bob Miller, who died last month aged 67, first joined the old Merseyside Branch of the Party in 1970 after having been active in the National Secular Society, but left the Party for a time after a branch disagreement. When Merseyside Branch revived in the 1980s, Bob rejoined and was a stalwart at meetings and worked hard selling the Standard, most typically at Williamson Square in Liverpool for many years. At one point BBC local radio used recordings of Bob on his pitch there in one of their programmes analysing the distinctive Liverpool ‘scouse’ accent.

For a short while Bob served on the Party’s Executive Committee and took his duties seriously and with a certain degree of dedication. He remained a staunch socialist until the end, the last 15 years or so of his life blighted by unemployment, this being in no small part related to his activities as a militant trade unionist in Merseyside during the 1970s and early 80s.                                       

DAP

Living on Tick (2016)

From the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Shakespeare’s Shylock to Dickens’ Scrooge, moneylenders have generally had a bad literary press, probably revealing people’s instinctive reaction to them, but their place in society remains central. We examine the role of debt in working-class life.

Robert Roberts’ The Classic Slum describes life in Salford in the first part of last century. The pawnshop was an essential part of the local community; many people were dependent on the short-term loans offered, with women often pawning the family’s ‘best’ clothes on Monday until the following Saturday. There was a social hierarchy among the working class, with skilled workers at the top, and various ‘disreputable’ individuals at the bottom; and position ‘was judged not only by what one possessed but also by what one pawned’. True destitution meant pawning not just clothes but also pots and rugs, and finally not being able to redeem what had been left with the broker. The interest charged was usually a penny in the shilling per week; sky-high, but less than the moneylender, who charged threepence in the shilling per week.

Pawnbroking is not now the widespread industry it was in the days Roberts was writing about, but it began to grow again from the 1980s. There are now over two million loans a year, and the market as a whole is worth £850m, though the average loan is less than £200 and is for three or four months. The National Pawnbrokers Association states that 88 percent of loans are redeemed, but that still leaves around 250,000 which are not (though this does not mean that the value of the goods has been completely lost). The NPA describes pawnbroking as ‘a serious alternative to using the services provided by the High Street bank’ and ‘a modern, friendly and convenient way of getting cash quickly’. They claim it is cheaper than a bank loan or using a payday lender.

In July 1954 war-time food rationing came to an end, as did restrictions on hire-purchase (‘never-never’) agreements for consumer durables such as radios, fridges and vacuum cleaners. This meant buying what were then relative ‘luxuries’, in contrast to buying essentials such as furniture this way back in the 30s. Nowadays, hire purchase is often used in buying cars, including companies buying a fleet of cars. For personal consumers, it avoids the need to pay a big sum up-front, but it can lead to problems: if you return an item after paying less than half its cost, you have to pay enough on top of what you’ve already paid to make up that half cost (so you might get just three months’ use of something but have to pay a year’s worth of instalments).

The extreme case of hire-purchase is that of the weekly payment stores, which make big profits, primarily from the massive interest rates they charge on their loans and the service cover they also sell. Back in 2012 the Guardian gave an example of an oven that could be bought from one such company for £562 (or £389 elsewhere) but would cost a whopping £1433 if bought on weekly instalments from that same company with service cover over three years. Sales pressure plus an inability to pay by other means can easily result in people taking on such commitments without quite realising what they are letting themselves in for.

If people are having trouble repaying any kind of debt, they may well have recourse to one of the payday loan companies that now exist on almost every high street. But these again are incredibly expensive, with annual interest rates sometimes topping several hundred percent. The debt charity Step Change gives an example of someone borrowing just £200 for twenty days at the maximum allowable rate of 0.8 percent a day. If you repaid the loan on time, you would pay back £232, which is already quite a stiff rate of interest. But if you are late, then the interest mounts up, a late fee is added and you have to pay interest on the late fee. If you are ninety days late repaying, you would repay £400 (double the original loan, and the legal maximum that can be charged).

As this suggests, being poor is in itself expensive. Using prepayment meters for energy is more expensive than a standard tariff; and borrowing money means a higher rate of interest if you do not have a good credit record. No wonder debt counselling has become a minor industry in its own right. Some writers have even referred to there being a ‘poverty industry’.

Mortgages are of course the biggest source of debt, while students typically have over £40,000 in debt when they graduate. But plenty of people borrow – especially from payday loan companies and even doorstep lenders – to pay for everyday expenses such as food and energy as they struggle to make it to the next payday. They also borrow to pay for Christmas and so avoid disappointing their kids. And they borrow to pay off existing debts, which can swiftly lead to things spiralling out of control. Losing your job, falling ill, the break-up of a relationship: all these can tip people over the edge into chronic indebtedness.

The Money Charity provides a great many statistics on the extent of debt. For instance, in February this year, the average debt per household, including mortgages, was over £54,000. Outstanding consumer credit lending was £180bn, including £63bn on credit cards. Every day over two hundred people are declared insolvent or bankrupt, and twenty-five properties are repossessed. Other sources have noted the big increase in household debt over the last year or so, with the average increasing by over a third to £13,500 (mortgages aside). Shelter reported that one in ten parents thought that they might be unable to pay their rent or mortgage bills in January this year. Moreover, in March the increase in borrowing was the biggest since March 2005, before the recession began, leading debt charities to become increasingly worried.

The definition of ‘problem debt’ is when a family pays more than 25 percent of their gross monthly pay on servicing unsecured debts, and this applied to 3.2 million families by 2014 (up from 2.5 million in 2012). The pressure of debt can be overwhelming. In the words of one man who eventually did cope with his problems: ‘I felt like I was drowning, felt trapped. There was no light coming from anywhere, it was horrendous. And at one point I did go really dark and I did want to end it all’ (BBC Online, 20 January). Some people do in fact commit suicide because of their debt problems. In November 2013, for instance, a 60-year-old man from Southampton killed himself after taking on £20,000 in debts from twelve payday loan firms: his jobseeker’s allowance had been stopped on the grounds that he was fit to work, even though he had an illness that prevented him from swallowing (Daily Mirror, 22 July 2014).

Pawnbroking dates back at least to Ancient Greece, but it takes capitalism, with the cash nexus touching almost all aspects of life, with the never-ending influence of advertising, and with the insecurity felt by many workers, to make so many people subject to the worry and pressure of debt.

                                                                                                                                     Paul Bennett

A socialist life (2010)

Book Review from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Role-modeling Socialist Behavior: The Life and Letters of Isaac Rab, Karla Doris Rab..Lulu.com. 490 pages.

This book is a worthy account of the life and works of one of America’s unsung working class heroes, Isaac Rabinowich, commonly known as Rab. Through the medium of his granddaughter’s personal account of Rab’s family life, it is particularly valuable to be able to view a Socialist such as Rab as a real person, tolerant and enlightened, not just a faceless propagandist. Well illustrated, this is a useful and thought-provoking book, carried out in a charmingly eccentric style.

The story of Rab is, in a sense, the story of real Socialism in America. Rab was born on 22 December 1893 in Boston, the old home of American ‘freedom’. His parents, Sheppie and Sarah, had recently arrived from the shetetls of eastern Europe but were literate and engaging, attributes which Rab inherited in spades. Rab also inherited his father’s socialist background, joining the Socialist Party of America at the age of sixteen. Despite his humble origins, Rab excelled academically and was accepted for Harvard. However, wanting to be a real worker rather than an academic drone, he headed instead to an agricultural college in Ohio. A chance flood destroyed his practical project and exhausted his financial resources, so, in the summer of 1915, he headed to Detroit, where a well-placed class mate acquired him a job at the Ford’s factory. Via the Detroit local of the SPA, he soon came into contact with Adolph Kohn and Moses Baritz, two SPGBers fleeing the effects of the First World War. The encounter was to change his life. Kohn and Baritz won Rab over to Marxism, to which he would dedicate the rest of his life.

On 7 July 1916, Rab and 42 other attendees of Kohn-Baritz classes established the Workers’ Socialist Party of the United States, along the lines of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Faced with political repression, the group was to be short-lived and in 1919 was reconstituted as a social club known as the Detroit Socialist Education Society. Shortly after Rab was sacked by Ford for his political activities and moved with his wife and young family back to Boston.

The 1920s were difficult both politically and personally for Rab and it was not until the end of the decade that things began to move again. On a national level, comrades in New York began to issue a journal, The Socialist, Rab being one of the foremost contributors. Shortly thereafter, on 12 September 1930, the Workers’ Socialist Party was re-formed, with Rab a member of first Executive Committee. In Boston, Rab helped form a Socialist Education Society which in 1931 became the Boston local. It was around this time that Rab became friends with Anton Pannekoek, astronomer and Marxist theoretician, who stayed with Rab during trips to America. Rab was also on good personal terms with the council communist Paul Mattick.

In 1939, editorship of The Western Socialist, previously a journal of the Socialist Party of Canada, was moved to Boston because of fears that the paper might be suppressed due to the outbreak of the Second World War, it becoming a joint publication with the WSPUS. The following year, national headquarters was moved to Boston too. Boston remained the centre of WSPUS activity in North America for the next forty years.

Boston local continued its extensive social and political programme into the ‘40s, which were, perhaps, the golden age of the WSPUS. In 1947, confusion with the Socialist Workers’ Party, a Trotskyist organisation, caused the WSPUS to be renamed the World Socialist Party, a significant development which has spread throughout what is now known as the World Socialist Movement.

The 1950s, as in this country, were a period of rapid and steep decline for real Socialism. The WSPUS was dogged at this time by controversies over the ballot and violence. Rab and the Socialist stalwarts, however, carried on with same enthusiasm.

Better times came in the 1960s, with the revival of radical politics with the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and the opening up of new media for propaganda activities. The US Party was particularly enthusiastic in its use of radio programmes.

Rab remained throughout his life an active trade unionist, latterly as a member of the International Typographical Workers Union. He died in 1986.

Details on how to obtain a copy, write: WSPUS, P.O. Box  440247, Boston, MA  02144, USA or email spgb@worldsocialism.org

Kaz.

The Office (1996)

A Short Story from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Soon after leaving school I worked for a short time in an office. One climbed a rickety staircase, opened a door and entered a world where very strange people dwelt. Mrs Badcombe the wages clerk, Mr Willis the accountant and Pamela the typist.

All day Pamela bashed away at her typewriter, clackety-clack, brown wage envelopes and Mr Willis had his own fountain pen and studied lists and ticked them and sometimes went to the other department upstairs and then came back and started to study lists and tick them again.

And me? I sat at a desk in Reception and filed mysterious items away under the wrong headings and worked the switchboard and got too friendly with the customers who often rang with their enquiries. Truth to tell I was only too pleased to find someone to talk to in that odd little place where SILENCE boomed out alongside the clackety-clack of Pamela’s machine, and if the people I chose to exchange words with were the firm's clients then it had never occurred to me that they were anything more than people, so that a little chat about some topic of the day seemed innocent enough.

Mr. Chubb the manager also dwelt there . . .  in another little office where Manager was writ large on his door. He invited me in one day to discuss my “behaviour”. I wasn’t ladylike, he told me. I had a very unpleasant habit of clattering up and down the stairs. My jocular way of dealing with clients on the phone was not to be borne, he told me. My mode of filing was unacceptable. But my worst sin by far was that I encouraged Mrs Wilson, the office cleaner, to talk about her ailments and in particular her recent hysterectomy; not befitting a place of business, he told me.

I struggled to be ladylike, ever uncertain of what exactly that entailed. I avoided asking Mrs Wilson about her operation and so, normally a cheerful soul, she went about her business sulking and I no longer got a mug of cocoa at tea-break. But my filing improved and I was given letters to type. (I had begun attending a Commercial College in the evenings at my own expense.) I even answered the phone in a more business-like way and put calls through to the other department immediately instead of detaining the clients to gossip. In fact I was becoming just like the others and was worried about it.

One day I did a thing deemed to be more unforgivable than anything I had done to date. I referred to the boss Mr Len Carter as "Len”. “One thing you will have to learn,” said Mr Chubb,” . . . is that your superiors are never called by their first names.” Niggled at the distinction I retorted that I thought people were only "superior” by sheer virtue of the fact they possessed more money, more power or both. This remark brought on a silence that disturbed me by its intensity as Mr Chubb regarded me with contempt. “I wonder,” he said softly. “1 wonder if Mr Leonard Carter realises he is employing a communist.”

I did not settle easily into my new role as a communist, indeed I felt that it had been thrust upon me. Office colleagues eyed me suspiciously and as time went by I grew withdrawn. I made typing errors and everybody complained about the tea I made on Mrs Wilson’s days off.

Then one Friday I opened my wage packet, emptied it out onto my desk and found an extra threepenny piece amidst the cash. I must tell you that it never for one second occurred to return it to the wages clerk. My wage was paltry as it was and because I was a naive sixteen-year- old I really believed I had been awarded a pay-rise. I was foolish enough to entertain the notion that my new-found industrious ness had been noted and rewarded. That was until Mr Chubb emerged from his office.

“Miss Tweedie,” he asked. “Did you find a threepenny piece in your wage packet?” When I nodded his lip curled. "Then may I ask why it has not been returned to the Company?”

I tried to explain. I quickly realised that there was no indication of a pay-rise on my payslip. I felt confused but in no way guilty. Mr Chubb extended his hand, palm upwards, “Come on, give it back, it’s not your property.” He returned to his office and I knew I had been tested and found wanting. Now not only was I a communist but a thief too.

I found myself another job and left L.E. Carter. Mr Chubb said he hoped my future employer would find me satisfactory but he very much doubted it.

For the last time I went down the rickety staircase making as much clatter as I could. But a year in that strange place had done something to my perception of the world. I no longer believed it was wise to speak honestly or to be friendly and outgoing. As a commodity in the workplace I had failed miserably. I was too young then to realise that the workplace had failed me!

Heather Ball

Whitlow & Boyle (Engineers) (1998)

A Short Story from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr Whitlow kept me waiting while he made a couple of phone calls and wrote something down in a ledger. I was used to this, it was deliberate, it happened every time I went for a job interview. I was beginning to understand the psychology behind it.

"So you want to work here do you?" he asked at last. Of course I didn't want to work there, but I had to work somewhere, so I nodded. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk and handed it to me. "You've worked a capstan lathe before, you say, draw me one." Astonished I told him I wasn't very good at drawing, but he insisted. "Draw me a capstan lathe."

About ten minutes later I handed the piece of paper back to him, and he studied it for what seemed like ages, turning it one way and then another, even upside-down. "This doesn't look anything like a capstan lathe."

"Well, as I said I'm not very good at drawing."

Mr Whitlow glared at me across his desk making me feel more than usually conscious of my appearance, of my black skirt and white blouse and the new handbag I'd bought for the occasion. I wondered if Mr Whitlow found it hard to imagine me clad in a greasy overall and a turban to protect my hair.

"How are your legs?" he asked. Thankfully he didn't seem to require an answer so I waited. "Any varicose veins?"

"I'm only twenty three," I replied with a nervous smile.

He waved a hand in the direction of a glass-panelled door in a corner of his office. "That lot out there, that's Doris on the back machine. Came in to see me only this morning." He mimicked, "'Could I have a sitting-down job today, Mr Whitlow, me varicose veins are playing me up?' Do they think this is a bloody holiday camp? There's Ethel with her bunions and corns and Vera with her aching leg joints, all of them wanting sitting-down jobs. So if you're wanting a sitting-down job, forget it. And this drawing is nothing like a capstan lathe."

Nettled, I told him I'd thought the vacancy was for a machine operator not for someone skilled in the art of drawing, but to my relief he ignored this feeble attempt to defend myself.

"What about family?"

"Yes, mother, father, four brothers."

Mr Whitlow picked up a pencil and stabbed it at the surface of his desk to emphasise his next words. "Don't get funny with me girl. Any children, babies, buns in the oven?"

"Oh no."

"Not in a union, are you?"

"The AEU," I told him proudly.

"Well, forget that, we're non-union here."

Employers always said that, I'd noticed, as though some power from on high had decreed a state of non-trade unionism for their particular company. Another much-used argument was that conditions in their factory were so good as to discount any justification for a union.

"There's a slump coming," continued Mr Whitlow, "and when it gets here me and my kind are going to have the pick of the workforce. Not only will there not be any sitting-down jobs there won't be any jobs at all and people like you will be begging for work."

I froze in my chair. I resented Mr Whitlow's class attitude to someone he believed was hardly in a position to retaliate. I thought about the boredom and misery of standing at a capstan lathe for nine hours a day and the pittance I would be likely to receive for this each week. I even began to feel that Mr Whitlow detected something in my manner (a kind of contempt perhaps) that made him speak to me in this way.

"Well if you want the job be here at a quarter to eight sharp on Monday morning."

"But I thought it was an eight o'clock start."

"It is, but there's queue at the clocking-in machine and anyone clocking in after eight loses an hour's pay. And then there's the time taken up in the cloakroom with all the titivating that goes on with you women. Christ knows why; you're all covered in machine oil by the end of the day. And you'll need an overall, we don't supply them and you're responsible for laundering too."

Suddenly my career as a capstan lathe operator seemed less attractive than ever before.

"There it is," said Mr Whitlow, "take it or leave it."

I rose to my feet, checked to see that my nylons' seams were straight and then headed for the door. There I turned to face him which as much dignity as I could muster.

"I'll leave it," I said.

Heather Ball