Common Market: The great debate — where we stand (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who has recently been able to spare time from the test matches, television, pop music and so on may be aware that there is a new, rival attraction in the entertainment field. It is called the Great Debate on the Common Market, which makes it sound as if we have all been joining in, in every pub and bus queue and factory floor. At times, indeed, it has gone beyond mere entertainment, what with Harold Wilson walking about with a small forest of knives sticking out of his back and the Labour Party taking such fright at the public spectacle of its leader opposing something which his government tried to pull off, and then spending so much time in pious justification of his two contradictory attitudes, that they have suddenly started a Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to Harold campaign.

In fact, as Wilson (who has been known at times to tell the truth) says, there is a wide split of opinion on whether this country should join the Common Market. Both the big parties are split although the Tories, perhaps not yet completely recovered from their stunned delirium at the victory of June 1970, have been largely successful in stifling their dissenters. The public outside the parties are divided; soon, perhaps, marriages will be ruined and brother fall out with brother, swearing never to speak to each other again. And all because of the Great Debate on the Common Market.

One problem which the politicians have is in stimulating interest in something which has been an issue for about ten years. And such are the intricacies of capitalism’s trade — its agricultural support policies, its commodities agreements, its financial jugglings, that only an addict must now be able to stay awake when the thing is being discussed while the rest of us drop off in front of the telly set.

On the one hand the government case for going into Europe, while admitting that some food prices are going to rise (which, Common Market or no Common Market, is a pretty safe bet anyway) is that this is a tremendous opportunity for unheard of prosperity for us all. The official Factsheets on Britain and Europe talk about British industry having access to a market of more than 250 million people, of firms being able to plan their operations more adequately, of the “major benefits” resulting from the removal of tariffs between Britain and Europe.

It does not need a cynic to perceive a certain familiarity in those promises of a golden future. We can all remember similar prospects, held out over similar schemes of international unity or even international separatism, or some equally irrelevant proposal. The opponents of British entry seem to think that the golden future is here already. They argue that membership of the Six will mean abandoning, or weakening, the trading tie-ups with the Commonwealth, with no compensatory advantages. They mutter about upsetting the balance of payments, of losing that comforting trading surplus, which apparently stands between us and some unimaginable calamity. Some opposition may even be based upon xenophobic fears about the free movement of labour — about virile Frenchmen and Italians flooding over to steal all the best jobs and the most desirable women.

Now the Socialist Standard has always made it clear that such matters as the balance of trade, the exports of one capitalist state as against another, the exploitation of markets, are of interest to us only in as much as they illuminate the hopeless anarchies and inadequacies of capitalism. It is for this reason that we do not take a stand of opposing or supporting the efforts of the British capitalist class to get into Europe. This is not a matter of refusing to have any opinion or of imitating the feat of Wilson (and of Gaitskell before him) of sitting on the fence. In fact on this issue, as on all others, we have our own side. We are there, alone, but unlike the rest we know why.

At this point it is necessary to return to basics, however tiresome this may be to anyone who hungers for the excitement of the Great Debate. The first basic is that this is capitalism — if it were not, there would be no such thing as the Common Market. The attempt to join Europe, and the arguments about it, are all based upon the acceptance of capitalism, its needs and its priorities. We are invited to believe that these needs are of concern to workers, that the failure or success of the British application will make enough difference to our lives to be worth taking sides over. But the least which is needed to support this argument is evidence that the countries which are in the EEC are significantly different from those which are not in it.

So here is another basic. Capitalism divides its people into two classes — capitalist and worker, employer and employee, owner and non-owner, whichever term we choose to apply. These two classes are engaged in a struggle over the ownership of the means of wealth production. This struggle takes the form of disputes over wages, which are the only method open to the working class of obtaining wealth, either as the basic necessities like food or the lesser needs such as holidays and so on.

What this means is that a permanent feature of capitalism is (need we say this, in 1971?) the industrial struggle. Sometimes a strike; sometimes a go-slow; sometimes a lock-out. But always a struggle, never ceasing because it is inherent within capitalism. It is not unfair to insist that, if all the hopes and promises about the prosperity of the Common Market were real, its record of strikes and other industrial disputes would be markedly different. Of course it is only necessary to state this to illuminate the absurdity of the idea; France in May 1968, for example, is too recent a memory. Since then there has been a more “normal” pattern of industrial struggle, of transport strikes paralysing Paris, of a one-day general strike throughout Italy and so on. But the point is made. The class division of capitalism is as evident, as divisive and as disruptive in Europe as elsewhere.

We have already said that the Common Market could exist only within capitalism. This is so, first, because capitalism is a market system; its wealth is produced for the market, for sale as distinct from for human need. Now this might be all very well except for the fact that there is no way of adjusting production and the market so that they meet each other’s demands. Capitalism goes to great lengths to find a way of doing this; we are swamped with economic experts and market forecasters and all sorts of other very clever men and most of them are confident, at some time or other, that they have solved the problem and are about to bring everlasting profitability to capitalist industry and trade.

But of course if they ever succeed in this we would never hear dread words like bankruptcy, redundancy, slump. There would never be spectacular collapses like Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde; there would never be unemployment and capitalism would sail along like a great clipper ship under full sail on a calm sea. What actually happens is that it is more like a coracle in the Bay of Biscay in a Force Nine gale. Even the politicians know this; did not the MacDonald government in the thirties blame their troubles onto an economic blizzard; did not Wilson’s lot moan that they had been “blown off course”?

Apply this yardstick again, how does the EEC measure up? Is all well economically across the Channel? All calm and under control? In truth, day by day the reports come in showing that the Market economy is as wild and uncontrollable as anywhere else. On July 27, for example, the West German Economics and Finance Ministry was worried that the “tensions” in the German economy were showing no signs of lessening, with industrial producer prices still rising. The next day the Paris Chamber of Commerce reported a slow-down in industrial production, with what they claimed as the annual growth rate at 4.5 per cent as against the 6 per cent prevailing since last autumn. On July 30 the French Minister of Finance was admitting that the rate of inflation for the first half of 1971 was “not satisfactory”; prices had risen at twice the rate hoped for by the government and a wave of strikes is expected after the summer holidays.

It may be argued that these are trivialities, were it not that they are symptomatic of the basic chaos of capitalism, all over the world. Another current problem of the capitalists of the Six is their “voluntary” limitation of steel exports to America. At present the annual growth of these exports is limited to 5 per cent; the Americans are reported to want to reduce this to 2.5 or 3 per cent, while the European steelmen are anxious that Japanese steel, limited already in its access to the American market, may seriously compete in Europe. Negotiations are, naturally, going on but it does not need a fortune teller to know that they will be a typically futile exercise, with no basic effect on the system nor on the interests of its people.

These are examples of the anarchy of capitalists. As far as Europe is concerned, the anarchy is such that even the “experts” are not united in their forecasts on the British application, nor even on what is happening in Europe at the present. A study published last December by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (described by The Guardian as “the main independent economic forecasting and analytical group in Britain”) contradicted many of the opinions and forecasts from the other “experts”. Compare these views, from the government’s Factsheets and the Institute’s report as it appeared in The Guardian (1 December 1970).:

“Factsheets: One of the striking facts about the Common Market is its rate of growth.

NIESR: The economic growth of the Six has slowed down since the EEC was formed while that of the industrialised countries outside has speeded up.

Factsheets: . . . the main industrial advantage to us would be direct access … to a market of more than 250 million people.

NIESR: So far as the larger market offers advantages, Britain is already getting these from the outside.

Factsheets: The fact that our share of the Community’s total imports of manufacturers is still only about 7 per cent indicates the potential for growth in exports to Europe.

NIESR: Britain’s competitive position inside the Community might suffer as a result of cost increases imposed by Community policies …”

It would be possible to fill up several issues of the Socialist Standard with this kind of analysis of the Common Market. When we have cleared away all the rubbish of politicians’ speeches and the contradictory ramblings of assorted economists we are left with some basic facts. The EEC is no more than yet another instalment in the theory of the larger market which assumes, with absolutely no justification, that the problems inherent in a small market disappear, or can be more easily tamed, in a large market. What, if anything, actually happens is that the problems may well get larger with the market and as the intensity of wage-labour exploitation increases.

The problems are not, and cannot be, solved because the market is itself basically uncontrollable. If it were any other way, capitalism would be a much saner and more peaceable society than it is. Through all the Great Debate on the Common Market none of this is being argued; the debate is pre-occupied with other, quite irrelevant, matters such as commodity agreements and budget contributions. And the working class, who are always being misled into taking their masters’ sides in the disputes of capitalism, are now persuaded once again that their interests are what is at stake in the Great Debate and that it is all happening so that their lives can be improved.

The facts show otherwise. Working class lives can be improved by the simple process of getting rid of the social system which divides people into worker and capitalist and which sets up the conflicting interests and the anarchy of the market economy. That is what socialists want, what we work and struggle for. We are not detached from the Great Debate; we are deeply involved in it because we see in it more evidence of the futility and impotence of capitalism and of the urgent need to replace it with a society of common ownership.

Ivan

Italy: The sour smell of success (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Economic miracle turns sour” was the headline of a recent Financial Times survey on Italy. Italian industry has come down with a bump from the “boom” of the last ten years.

Low cost-structures, the result of large-scale State takeover of industries, exploitation of previously untapped natural resources and plentiful supplies of cheap and unmilitant labour, allowed Italy to compete very favourably on international markets in the ’50s and ’60s. She benefited particularly from the Common Market removal of tariff barriers. However, rising costs and the appearance of cheaper competitors like Japan and South Korea have slowed down considerably her rate of economic growth, and brought other problems in their wake.

True Italy is no longer placed, as she was in the first years after the second World War, alongside Spain, Greece and Portugal as one of Western Europe’s backward countries. She is the tenth manufacturing nation in the world. But as an advanced capitalist country, Italy now suffers from all the same internal contradictions as her older, capitalist neighbours.

In industry short-time and redundancies are already becoming commonplace. Even during the boom period unemployment never fell below half a million. Now, together with prices, it is rising steeply. Rapid industrial advance, first without the Common Market and then inside it has clearly done nothing to solve working-class problems. Capitalist expansion is not a working-class issue. The benefits of it go largely to the ruling class. Decisions taken on such matters as nationalisation or the Common Market depend on ruling class interests. Their effects for good or bad on the working-class are quite marginal and quite incidental.

In Italy the worst signs of the anarchy of production for profit can be seen in the fields of housing, public transport, health and education. There has been no development in social services to match the rapid changeover since the war from a largely agricultural to a highly industrialised economy. When people flocked from the land into the industrial centres of Northern Italy to become wage workers, they found themselves the victims of uncontrolled building speculation, insufficient transport facilities, a primitive health structure and a hopelessly outdated and inefficient education system. Immigrants from the South (who formed the majority of the new wage slaves) were the worst hit. They were the least able to defend themselves from the conditions they found. Job rivalry with native northerners caused widespread discrimination of an almost racial character. Furthermore as the North prospered, the mainly agricultural South tended to decline relatively. Despite piecemeal attempts at establishing industry in the South, it is generally recognised that the gap in living standards between North and South is still actually on the increase.

Another point worth mentioning is the unlimited sacrifice of environmental to economic interests during the last twenty years. Rapid industrialisation has made Italy an ecological horror story. Eighty-five per cent of its coastline is at pollution danger level and the smog in Milan and Turin (caused largely by the massive increase in car population) is as bad as in Tokyo. The possible decline of the very lucrative tourist industry is just one small indication of the unplannability of capitalism.

Social protest lay dormant in the first part of Italy’s period of high economic growth. In the last five years, however, accumulated working-class grievances have come home to roost. The trade unions have not only concerned themselves with wage bargaining, but have also backed social reforms. Demands supported by strike action have been made for better and lower cost housing (there is a large “surplus” of accommodation on lease at £50 a month and over) and for improvements in the health services. Archaic educational structures have caused tremendous upheavals in Italy’s schools and universities. Furthermore spontaneous riots, especially in the impoverished South, have been touched off by the unemployment situation and by administrative inertia over local reforms.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI), opportunist as all so-called “communist” parties anywhere and here far stronger than elsewhere in Western Europe, has become the reforming party par excellence — while out of power that is. It is a past master at using working-class grievances and demands for reform to attract support. Kept out of “centre-right” and “centre-left” coalitions since 1947, the PCI, with up to 29 per cent of the national vote, would dearly love to have a respectable place in the Italian government. It points to the inefficiency and stop-gap nature of present and previous administrations, but fails to say how its own inclusion would lead to greater stability.

It is, in fact, quite true to say that Italian coalition governments, the caretakers of the Italian capitalist class, have spent most of their time in power since the war bickering and squabbling amongst themselves. They have proved most inefficient administrators of capitalism. The heavy strains and stresses which go hand in hand with commercial society everywhere have been vastly increased by the wheeling and dealing of the “political gangsters” at Rome. It will come as no surprise if in the near future the PCI, already in control of certain regions under Italy’s recent decentralisation programme, realises its dream of having a share in a Western capitalist government. A powerful weapon on its side is the Italian Social Movement (MSI); the strongest avowedly Fascist party in advanced Western Europe.

In reality capitalism’s deficiencies are to be explained by reference not to political incompetence but to the basic conflict of interests that exists in capitalism between employer and employee. The employer is all the time pushed by competitive market forces to produce as cheaply as possible. If he is to stay in business therefore, he must keep his costs down, which means getting as much work as possible out of his employee for the lowest possible wages. The worker, on the other hand, strives, as he must, to keep up his living standards and better his working conditions as much as he is able.

In Italy, as elsewhere, the mass of workers have never yet actually questioned the right of their employers to exploit them for wages. They limit themselves to bargaining for higher wages, using the threat or the weapon of strike action. Moreover, in recent years not only the traditional sectors have used these tactics to defend their interests. Doctors, civil servants and teachers now engage in traditionally working-class actions. The high peak of unrest was the end of 1969, when long-term collective contracts for six million workers were due for renewal. Prolonged strikes were followed by wage increases and improved fringe benefits. But this was not, as indeed it could not be, the end of the story. Since that time strikes have been endemic in Italian society. They will continue to be so. They are an unpleasant necessity of capitalism, but of course no lasting answer to basic working-class problems.

Street politics is the domain of rival groups of thugs calling themselves Maoists (or even “Socialists”) and Fascists. Pitched street battles between left, right and forces of “law and order” are what often faces the inhabitants of the big Italian cities. Apart from the political confusion this spreads among the working-class, it helps to create an atmosphere of fear and tension in which the majority of people would welcome undemocratic government action to outlaw political groups considered “extremist”. Too late then to cry wolf and fascism from the rooftops.

It is truly tragic that the many young people in these groups look no further than eastern state capitalist dictatorships for a solution to the problems of life under western capitalism. However, they do realise that the society in which they live is not run in working-class interests. That in itself is a step forward. We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain point to the fallacy of their ‘solution’, restate the immediate and pressing need for a world of free access and look forward to the day when a genuine Socialist Party is set up in Italy with the same aims and principles as the Companion Parties of Socialism.

Howard Moss

China and America (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

After more than twenty years of waging a propaganda war against each other and working up suspicions and hatred among their respective working classes, the American and Chinese mobster politicians are to seek some kind of reconciliation.

To those numbered in their millions all over the world, who mouthed and continue to mouth the slogans of Chinese capitalism denouncing “American imperialism”, and equally to all those who mouthed the phrases of American capitalism denouncing “Chinese expansionism”, it must seem as bewildering as were the Catholic church to suddenly get together with the League of Militant Atheists. After mountains of vitriolic propaganda, oceans of hate and the widespread belief that a real and unbridgeable ideological chasm separates the two sides, what explanation can there be for such a momentous reversal of attitudes?

Such about-faces are far from unheard of in the double dealing world of lies and hypocrisy which is capitalism. Stalin and the Bolshevik heads of Soviet capitalism got together with Nazi Germany and, after denouncing the war as imperialist, wound up on the side of British and American imperialism against their former Nazi friends. Conversely, Churchill who had spent twenty-five years denouncing the Soviet regime as a “cancerous growth”, wound up as head of British capitalism, supporting Soviet state-capitalism against Hitler and Mussolini (whom he had formerly admired).

Russia and China are capitalist countries, whose foreign policies, quests for world markets, world investments and military power only make sense when seen as part of the world-wide rivalry that characterises capitalism everywhere.

If the British capitalist class (or most of them) are jubilant at the prospect of multiplying their profits in the European market of 250 million people, large sections of the American capitalist class must have been biting their nails for years at the frustration of missing the pickings of the Chinese market.

During the years since 1948, trade, and even more so investment, has been rigidly restricted between Western capitalism and China. Successive American governments have pursued a policy of “containment”. For many years developing Chinese capitalism depended heavily on Russian equipment and technicians. But during the last ten years when the Russian and Chinese rulers have been embroiled in mutual abuse, technicians have been withdrawn. All this has forced capitalism in China to rely on its own resources and know-how. It has been found that containment and trade embargoes only meant less reliance on the outside world and a greater impetus for developing internal technology.

The priorities of capitalism in China are the same as in other powerful capitalist countries. They exploded their first A-bomb in October 1964 followed by their first H-bomb two years later. From then on it was only a matter of time before they mastered the rocket techniques for delivering them. This marked a significant turning point in how the West regarded the threat of China. When China put her first satellite into orbit in April 1970, Time magazine (11 May 1970) discussed the prospects of rockets and guidance systems and declared, “Peking beyond any doubt will, within weeks or months, possess at least the first elements of a nuclear missile force.” The article went on to review the likely impact on other countries and said “As Japan assumes a larger role in Asia, the country may feel the need for the superpower weapons to match its growing international status”. Which is all very ominous and shows how commercial struggles and military power go together.

During this period there was diminishing opposition to China’s entry into the so-called United Nations. It became known that despite all the mud-slinging, American and Chinese representatives had for years been meeting secretly in Warsaw.

True to their dedication to profits and military force, it took the possession of nuclear weapons to make American capitalism take Chinese capitalism seriously.

Nixon has pulled off the political coup of a life time—if things continue to go in a direction favourable to both sides. Which is not bad considering he does not officially recognise the existence of the Peking government. However, these get-togethers can burst into flame one moment and freeze over the next. But no doubt the masters of mass head-fixing on both sides will be ready to blame each other if it all turns sour. Just as Nixon and Chou-En-Lai will be seen on television smiling and embracing each other, having forgotten the threats of war and mutual destruction so the threats will be revived and the smiling forgotten, if after all it does not come off. An additional irony is that it should fall to Nixon to go sweet-talking in China, since it was he who first made his name as a red-baiter in the post-war years.

Peace is avowed as the heart-felt desire of both sides. And no doubt many millions of ordinary workers will welcome the prospect of diminished hostility. Any sign of hope will be grabbed at by a generation that has seen nothing but wars and military build-ups. But here again there is plenty of evidence to show how hollow these hopes are. There have been hundreds of conferences since the end of the Second World War and the major powers (America, Russia, France, China and Britain) have endlessly negotiated and yet there have been 73 wars including Korea and Vietnam, between 1945 and 1968. Many times hopes have been built up of reducing nuclear weapons, but despite negotiations they have steadily proliferated. After years of friendly relations, Russia and China came close to war in 1969. These two giants keep up the pretence of being different from imperialist America and Britain and used to heap admiration upon each other as “socialist” brothers. Yet they were driven to each other’s throats by the same sordid territorial ambitions as any openly capitalist countries.

What chance is there of China and America forming a relationship where commercial, strategic and territorial ambitions do not clash? It is precisely these interests which make capitalism what it is. The struggles for trade, investments, strategic positions and profits, make clashes inevitable.

The war in Vietnam has dragged on despite years of negotiations. All the suffering, death and destruction are as nothing to the negotiators who ruthlessly stick out for the interests they represent. China may now be expected to use her influence to pull American chestnuts out of the fire. Despite their support for North Vietnam and all the years of anti-American propaganda, such a service to American capitalism must now be regarded as a good bargaining lever. During 1966 China supplied the American air-force with steel for building air-bases in full knowledge of what this meant for their allies in the North. So both sides are well versed in the arts of cynicism and double-cross.

The Japanese government seems enthusiastic at the prospect of a new approach to China. Japan fought a long and bitter war to get her hands on the loot from China. What they failed to achieve by arms they now hope to achieve through the circulation of commodities. Japan is in an expansion frenzy and is hungry for raw-materials and markets.

There may be a period of mad scramble to get into China with capital investments to develop industry and extract minerals, but in the long-term, another massive rival for markets will emerge. Capitalism can operate in no other way. The smiles and frowns of politicians only reflect the prevailing situations presented to them by capitalism.

The final irony, to this latest stage of developments between China and America, might be Russian opposition to China’s entry into the UN. The Russian ruling class too have established “better relations” with Washington, so they may well play it cool. Their reaction will in any case be calculated to create whatever pressure is need to make Russian interests felt in what is going on.

Regardless of the public face they show, Russia, China and America will watch each other very closely. They are each in the same game for what they can get. The fact that friendly relations may exist for a time between each of them, should delude nobody. Trade does not mean trust. They will continue to spy on each other. Investments do not receive peace. They will each maintain their nuclear and other weapons.

Only the working class can get rid of this system of mutual suspicion, rivalry and war. This will involve establishing a world community where trade and investments and military force will have no place. Neither will the cynicism and hypocrisy of politicians.

Harry Baldwin

“Too much” food again (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism we are faced with a seemingly insoluble contradiction. Poverty and hunger exist in the midst of potential plenty. Within the private property relationships of capitalism the existence of means for ending this problem can itself appear to be a problem.

Take for example three reports in just one edition of The Guardian, that of July 12. In it we are informed on page 3 that:

“The world’s population will double by the year 2004 at the present growth rate, yet food production has already declined on a per capita basis, the UN reported today . . . agricultural production in 1969, the latest year for which comprehensive figures were compiled by UN statisticians, was 2 per cent lower than the previous year.”

A serious problem by any standard when one considers that the majority of the world’s people are inadequately fed at present. But here comes the contradiction . . . Turning over to page 4 we see an article by John Cunningham entitled quaintly “Scientists look into eggs”. He tells us that:

“Scientists are going to work on an egg — actually thousands of eggs — to try to find new uses for a surplus which is worrying the Eggs Authority so much that it is prepared to spend £40,000 on research and development this year.

‘We are not simply looking for food uses’, Mr. Bernard Mallett, the authority’s chief executive, said yesterday. ‘Frankly, anything could hold the key. It could be an industrial use, the manufacture of plastics, decorating materials, cosmetics . . . who knows? We hope research will find some profitable outlet for eggs surplus to even the food products market.'”

However the troubles of the Egg Marketing Board are nothing compared with the problems reported on page 12, in the Business Section, to be afflicting the Common Market Commission in Brussels.

“The record grain now ripening in the fields of Europe is causing grave concern . . . The crop is currently estimated at 174 million tons — four million tons more than the highest previous total. 

If such a crop is harvested, it could revive the nightmare of big surpluses in Europe.”

And their solution? “The Commission”, said The Guardian, “can only pray for rain”.

These contradictions are an inevitable outcome of the commodity system. Under capitalism food, together with other things we need in order to live, is private property. Wealth takes the form of commodities, that is, it is produced not primarily that people might eat, but to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. If too much food is produced for the market system to deal with profitably then the owners and those who run capitalism are faced with a “problem”. But this is only a problem where the relationships of ownership exist.

In a Socialist society, where the means of life will be owned in common by the world community, food will be produced not for profit but to satisfy human need. With the removal of the artificial barrier of the profit-motive, producing sufficient food to feed all the people of the world would present very few problems. Yet today while men and women go hungry eggs are “fed to minks to improve the quality and sheen of the fur” and men in Brussels are hoping rain will destroy food : what a sad reflection on the values of a society where profit is the paramount motive for production.

Gwynn Thomas

Economic Theory (1971)

Book Review from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economic Theory in Retrospect. M. Blaug, Heinmann Education. Second Edition £2.75.

This work by Blaug, who formerly taught economics at Yale University and is now Professor of the Economics of Education at the University of London Institute of Education, will be both useful and harmful, depending on how it is used. Students who treat it as a source for “potted” versions of economic theories and accept uncritically the author’s comments on those theories will often be misled. Those who take very careful note of the author’s warnings in his Preface to the Revised edition and use the book as he intended may find it useful. Blaug writes:

“In order to encourage students to doubt all commentators, including the author of this book, this edition like the first one contains detailed Reader’s Guides to cover major works in the history of economic thought. But as some reviewers of the first edition felt that these were more welcomed as heaven-sent cribs than as stimuli to consult the original writers, I should warn readers again that the Guides are neither summaries nor precis; they are running commentaries and more concerned with what the great economists might have meant than what they actually said. In short, they are especially designed to be provocative . . .”

When it comes to Marxian economics the reader should certainly challenge some of Blaug’s comments and interpretations. A few examples will illustrate this.

Discussing Marx’s description of the poverty and inequality of the early nineteenth century, Blaug writes that “it would be absurd to believe that the conditions described . . . reflect exploitation of labour rather than the low output per head of the working population”.

Blaug’s own explanation is that “the deplorable material standards of most working people . . . had more to do with the birth pangs of industrialization than with capitalist methods of organising production”, and that “living standards of the British working class could not have been raised significantly even by a perfectly egalitarian distribution of income”.

This was and still is the line of propaganda used by the defenders of capitalism. It would be interesting if Blaug “the commentator” (as distinct from Blaug the defender of capitalism) would explain what it was other than exploitation which enabled the rich, and in many cases idle, members of the capitalist class, to avoid sharing the poverty—after all the output of most of them wasn’t even low !

Blaug’s observations may also indicate that he thinks Marx aimed at egalitarian capitalism — which really is absurd. What Blaug has to meet is Marx’s proposition that in a Socialist system of society the output of useful articles will be greatly increased.

On page 279 Blaug has a fifteen line comment on Chapter 19 of Marx’s Capital Vol. I. (Chapter 17 in the Allen and Unwin translation).

Blaug writes:

“Chapter 19 plays hard and fast with the distinction between labour and labour-power. ‘Labour is the substance and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value’.”

Blaug’s comment on this is that Marx meant “that the worker has no value, it is only his services that are valuable”.

Marx didn’t say or mean what Blaug says he meant. He was dealing with the question whether what the worker sells is his labour or his labour-power, not, as Blaug seems to think, whether the worker sells himself. In that chapter Marx argued that it is labour-power that the worker sells and that is an embodiment of value (the quantity of labour necessary for its production). It is not his labour, or work, that the worker sells.

Blaug’s quotation is immediately preceded by the following which ought to have made Marx’s view clear.

“That which comes directly face to face with the possession of money on the market is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can no longer be sold by him.”

Some of Blaug’s book deals with Volume II and Volume III of Marx’s Capital. Unlike Volume I, which was completed for publication in his lifetime, the later volumes (and other material published after his death) were left incomplete, some of it in the form of mere notes. Engels who edited Volumes II and III drew particular attention to this in his Prefaces. In the Preface to Vol. Ill Engels wrote, for example, “nothing was available but a first draft, and it was very incomplete”. Some of the chapters were so incomplete that Engels left them as they were being unable to take on the task of getting them in proper shape. It is therefore often difficult to decide how far Marx’s first notes were really considered judgments. Blaug is not unaware of this but seems not always to have made due allowance for it.

In his ten line comment on ten chapters of Volume III (Page 290) Blaug makes statements which, to the reader not familiar with the originals may seem to indicate that Marx in Volume III was repudiating what he wrote in Volume I about the effect of an overissue of inconvertible paper currency on the general price level.

Fortunately, in this case, Engels spotted the possibility of misunderstanding and inserted a note in Vol. III pointing out that the material in Chapter XXXIII dealt only with the position in Britain at a time when the currency was primarily gold coin and convertible Bank of England notes, and not with the different situation of an inconvertible paper currency, the latter being as stated in Volume I. The note reads a follows:

“Inconvertible bank notes are not taken into consideration at all here; inconvertible bank notes can become universal means of circulation only under conditions in which they are actually backed up by National credit, as is the case of Russia at present. In that case they fall under the laws of the inconvertible National paper money, which have been developed already in Vol. I, Chapter III 2‘ Coins and Symbols of Value‘.

The chapter of Volume I referred to set out Marx’s view that, in accordance with the labour theory of value, the doubling of an issue of inconvertible paper currency merely serves to double the price level.

Blaug deals with Keynes and the neo-Keynesians in Chapter 15 and here his method shows its weakness. In thirty pages he gives a running commentary on Keynes and his critics and commentators, indicating here and there his own reservations. It might have been more useful if he had separately provided his own considered views on Keynesian theory and its practical application in the past thirty years.

Edgar Hardcastle

SPGB Autumn Delegate Meeting (1971)

 Party News from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1971)

Party News from the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

One tweak needed (2026)

From the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Societies in every part of the world are currently organised around the same, single feature – a system of production driven by the search for profit.

 

In other words, capitalist production, where most people work for wages while just a few scoop up the profit that the majority produces.

 

This system was progressive in the past – it promoted such a huge increase in industrial and agricultural productivity that every person in the world could now have access to all the goods and services needed for a reasonable life.

 

But a reasonable life for all is denied precisely because the system is driven by the profit motive. If there is no prospect of a profit, there is no question about it, there will be no production.   

 

At the same time, it’s a competitive system that inevitably forces individual capitals to expand or lose out to other capitals. But the competition is not (nor can be) subject to any overall planning, which results in the boom/bust pattern that has become a fact of life in the last 200 years, in which time capitalist production has come to predominate.

 

The need for expansion also results in war. Forget the rubbish about sovereignty and fighting for freedom. Modern war is all about markets, raw materials and transport routes.

 

And that inevitable expansion is becoming a major environmental threat too.

 

But hey! Don’t despair. That ‘one tweak’ in the headline? Take the world’s productive resources away from the minority and use those resources to produce for human need, not profit.

 

We know this sounds like a big ask, but remember, the world’s workers already run production from top to bottom. It makes sense for them to run it in their own interest.

Letter: The profit paradox: How capitalism’s engine fuels its own replacement (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

The profit paradox: How capitalism’s engine fuels its own replacement

Capitalism’s greatest irony is that the very force driving its expansion — relentless technological innovation — is also paving the way for its peaceful replacement. Each leap in technology makes it increasingly clear that our society possesses tools powerful enough to meet human needs directly, sustainably, and abundantly. As the means of production and communication become almost god like in their capabilities, it grows harder to justify using them primarily to generate private profit rather than to serve the common good.

While a socialist transformation could have occurred long ago, today’s technological landscape makes such a transition far more achievable. Automation, global communication networks, and advanced artificial intelligence have dramatically reduced the barriers that once made large scale social change difficult. As these technologies continue to advance, the path towards a democratic, worker induced re-organisation of society becomes smoother still.

More and more workers around the world are recognising this reality. As they see machines capable of producing immense wealth with minimal human labour, they increasingly question why that wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a small capitalist class. This growing awareness is likely to inspire peaceful, democratic organisation on a global scale. In my view, the accelerating development of modern machinery could make such a transformation possible within the next thirty years.

Matthew Shearn

Letter: Communicating Power (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communicating Power

Dear Editors

I read Mike Foster’s article, ‘Proper Gander — Grander Designs’, which appeared in the July edition of the Socialist Standard with interest. The point about Chatsworth House being built to ‘communicate power’ resonates with me as Derbyshire County Council’s libraries have been used to deliver a dubiously named ‘community membership pass’, which promises free entry for two adults and six children.

As a library assistant for Derbyshire Libraries, I can’t help but feel that we’ve been used in a publicity stunt to maintain the duke’s prestige at his ducal seat. The booking and issuing of the tickets, managing waiting lists, taking numerous enquiries and calls each day have fallen on us when we’re already stretched thin. The bureaucracy that this one scheme has created is staggering.

Derbyshire has some affluent areas, but there are a lot of economically deprived areas. I find it hard to act as a ticketing agent for a rich duke whilst many of the people who use my library are finding it difficult to survive in the current system. I’ve served families with children who are struggling with reading at school, and it’s a joy to see them thrive after getting hooked by the right book. Another customer is living in mould-riddled rental housing and relies on using our free PCs to find a better place whilst having a sympathetic ear to talk to. That is the bread and butter of my job — not ticket admin for a duke.

On 17th July, I read on BBC News that schools and libraries will facilitate Queen Camilla’s birthday book giveaway. Not right away, of course, but at Christmas. We can never expect a queen or a duke to understand the day to day lives of ordinary, working people. Nor will they act in our interests because that would clash with their interests as the upper class. Their paltry attempts at championing literacy are purely for public relations purposes. It’s an insult.

We’re meant to doff our caps like serfs when nobles and royals offer us scraps whilst offloading the admin on to overstretched public services. I won’t wax lyrical about libraries being used to soften the image of aristocrats who maintain the status quo. It’s all about communicating and maintaining power over the working class. It was working class labour that built Chatsworth House and its gardens, therefore we should be free to visit it at all times. The only way a true community membership can come to fruition is by having common ownership in a socialist society.

Name supplied

Halo Halo (2026)

The Halo Halo! column from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

You can’t say that! There’s lots of things wrong with wanting and attempting to police language. Something guaranteed to shock and surprise is saying: I’m a socialist; I’m an atheist, I like churches. Oh, and cathedrals. Chapels not so much. Too functional, too severe.

Socialist says, I like mosques, synagogues and temples too but they’re not so easily accessible. Now obviously it’s not the reason for their existence that one likes, they are, after all, brainwashing centres and indoctrination edifices for despots. No, it’s the aesthetic qualities, the enduring link to the class that laboured with their blood, sweat and tears to produce something long-lasting and magnificent in its grandeur and splendour or in its simplicity.

Churches are a bit like pubs, disappearing fast. The headline to a piece in the Mail Online of March 2025 said ‘Britain’s vanishing churches: More than 3,500 have shut in the past decade and been turned into mosques, nightclubs, luxury homes, pubs and even swimming pools as congregations plummet.’ And ‘… the Church of England has seen 400+ closures since 2010, it lacks a specific breakdown for the Catholic Church. The context mentions that the Catholic Church in the UK still has approximately 3,200 churches and that mainstream denominations are facing declines, but it does not provide a five-year sales figure for Catholic properties’.

Once upon a time sold-off churches always seemed to become carpet warehouses.

In Australia, New South Wales, there is an example of a catholic church that, like a battleship, was decommissioned/deconsecrated in the nineteen thirties. Presumably it has, since then been used for capitalist purposes, rental, leasing, making money. It would appear that the church was merely ‘resting’ and was not a dead church. A group of LGBT Australians who had a contract to use the church, sorry, ex-church, were getting kicked out by whoever owns it, because of a lifestyle incompatibility with ‘religious groups’ who objected to the ‘offensive trade’ taking place there. Offence can only be taken, not given.

Perhaps not quite the same as getting thrown out of a bar or public house for causing a disturbance, I’ve been thrown out of better places than this, you cry. Around the same time this LGBT group was being turfed out, the Roman Catholic Church said, “Hold my beer” and excommunicated at least 750 priests because of some malarkey that the Supreme Leader, Pope Leo XIV, didn’t like. Don’t do it, he said, but they did it anyway. It could also affect thousands of worshippers who have not been immediately expelled. The Society of St. Pius X wants to remain traditional but if you piss off the ones in power and they can subject you to sanctions then what are you to do? As the Australian group found out.

A socialist society will not preserve ex-religious buildings solely so that religious mumbo jumbo can take place in them. Instead, community decisions will decide what is the best purpose that these places can be put to for the greater good.

DC

Anti-Zionists (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here Where We Live is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund. By Molly Crabapple. Bloomsbury Circus. 2026.

The Jewish Bund was a Jewish workers’ organisation founded in 1897 in Vilnius (called Vilna in this book), today the capital of Lithuania but then part of the Russian Empire. Its official name in Yiddish, the Germanic language spoken by most Jews in Russia, was the Algemeyner Yiddisher Arbeter Bund (General Jewish Labour Union). It was the largest constituent organisation represented at the later founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the equivalent of the German Social Democratic Party,

They were known simply as the Bund, its members were Bundists and its doctrine Bundism. They claimed that only they should organise Jewish workers in Russia. Their immediate aim was the establishment of a democratic republic in Russia with cultural autonomy for Yiddish speakers, with socialism as the longer-term aim after Russia had passed through capitalism. Other Russian Social Democrats, including many of Jewish background such as Trotsky and Martov, argued that all workers in Russia, whatever their background or language, should be organised in a single all-Russia party.

When the issue came up at the RSDLP congress in 1903-4 and the Bundists’ claim was rejected, they walked out. This was a fateful decision as it meant that, in the more famous vote on how the party should be organised, Lenin and his supporters won and so got to be called ‘Bolsheviks’ (the majority) as opposed to those who lost the vote who came to be called ‘Mensheviks’ (the minority). The Bundists were opposed to Lenin’s organisational principles, and had they not walked out Lenin’s supporters might have ended up being called the Mensheviks.

The Bund’s policies and tactics were close to those of the Mensheviks and it would not be entirely unfair to describe them as Yiddish Mensheviks. Their mass basis was Jewish workers living within the ‘Pale of Settlement’, the part of the Russian Empire which covered most of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine as well as the whole of what is now Belarus and Moldova and to which ordinary Jews were confined.

After the First World War, when Poland was reconstituted as an independent state and 3.3 million Jews made up about 10 percent of the population, the Bund was active in Polish politics. Its opponents amongst Jews were the religious parties and, above all, the Zionists. In fact they were bitter enemies, the Zionists proposing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Bundists proposing full civil and social rights for Jews within Poland. Hence the Bundists’ slogan — and title of this book — ‘here where we live is our country’. They regarded themselves as Poles who happened to be Jews. Unfortunately for them, as Crabtree recounts, Polish ‘ethno-nationalists’ as they would be called today didn’t agree and by the late 1930s the Polish government was just as officially antisemitic as neighbouring Germany under the Nazis.

As for those who ended up in Russia, the Bolsheviks banned the Bund in 1921. Some Bundists joined the Bolshevik Party but most of them were executed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

Crabapple’s book is not a scholarly study of the Bund but an account based on what happened over the years in various places and to various personalities, especially her great-grandfather who had been a Bundist in a small town before emigrating to the United States in 1904. Hence the subtitle of her book, the ‘story’ (rather than the history) of the Bund. It makes for an easy and fascinating read. Disturbing too, in that many Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians joined in the extermination of the Jews in the Second World War.

Crabapple doesn’t disguise her own, left-wing political views and her opposition to what the Israeli state, currently controlled by extremist Zionists, is doing in Gaza. She quotes from Bundist publications predicting what would happen if ever a Zionist state was established in Palestine: the Jews would become the oppressors and the previously established population the oppressed. Which is exactly as it has turned out.

She realises that, with the social basis of the Bund’s support exterminated, after 1945 the Bund had no future and was destined to die out, in fact has aged out with the last surviving militants. Even so, she says it left a legacy. It provides Western Jews with a secular, alternative Jewish tradition to the nasty ethno-nationalism of Zionism. In fact, half the Jews in the world have done what the Bundists advocated: they have regarded where they live as their country. We would justify not being Zionists in a different way: workers should unite with other workers living under the same state to win political control there to dispossess the capitalist class. Where you live is where you should wage the class struggle.

Adam Buick

SPGB Snippets: Hold the tears (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

September 2, 2026

So Starmer is about to resign as an MP. This will allow him to follow the plan he set out after he resigned as PM, i.e.:

“I will now focus on other things and that will be international affairs including defence, security, trade and technology in a fast-changing world.”

A cynic might translate this as:

“I shall reap the dividend of eleven short years in parliament by selling the tiny remnants of my soul to defence corporations, multinationals, big tech, bankers and investors. A quick message to all of you who have worked 40 odd years to gain a pitiful pension to last you through your uncomfortable final years, it appears you joined the wrong pension scheme. So long suckers”

SPGB September Events (2026)

Party News from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Spoiling for choice (2026)

Party News from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

WHY WOULD ANYONE BOTHER WITH VOTING?

Can’t be bothered with voting?

Fair enough.

So let’s do this instead!

We know, they’re all rubbish. Red, blue, yellow, green, whatever colour that other lot are this week. They all want the same thing: to keep things ticking along for the people who own everything while the rest of us graft for a living.

Not voting will look like you don’t care and these career politicians will use that as a mandate when the election is over.

Get down to the polling station. Take the pencil. And write SOCIALISM right across the ballot paper.

Why bother? Spoilt ballots get counted and published. Sitting on sofas doesn’t. It tells them you’re not apathetic. It tells them you want the whole lot replaced, not just the faces at the top.

What we actually want: No bosses. No buying and selling of people’s lives. The factories, hospitals, land, the lot; owned by all of us, run for all of us. That’s socialism. Not state control. Not more welfare. Not reformism (tweaking the system) and hoping for the best. Actual common ownership.

None of the parties here are offering it. So don’t pick one. But don’t be silent either!

SPOIL IT PROPERLY. WRITE SOCIALISM.

Leaflet distributed during the election of the new Mayor of Greater Manchester in July.