Finance and Industry
EXPORTS AND HARD WORK
“Everyone must do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay from now on.”
“This is not a year in which we can afford large wage increases.”
“There is far too much indiscipline in every part of the nation.”
“We can no longer afford workers who inflict harm on production and the public with sporadic strikes.”
“Production, more production, more efficient production, cheaper production.”
These are typical of the pleas we get from Wilson and his Ministers almost every weekend now. We are told that there is a serious balance of payments problem which must be solved if prosperity is to be maintained. Labour Ministers, joined the other week by Prince Phillip, entertain us with stories about the simple economics of the family: if you spend too much you can only make this up by sacrifice and hard work. The implication of such stories is that the population of Britain, like members of a family, have a common interest. Socialists deny precisely this; today society is composed of two classes with completely opposing interests. This is why the analogy of the family is invalid; though there is perhaps a sense in which a nation can be likened to a family: a family of capitalists who have banded together for the furtherance of their mutual interests. When people talk of “the nation,” “the country” or “Britain” they are, in fact, referring to this small capitalist minority. For they are the country; Britain in this context is just a fancy collective name for them; the so-called national interest is their interest.
The balance of payments are the overseas trading and investment accounts of the capitalist class. They record, on one side, exports, loans from other capitalist groups, income from overseas investments and the investments of foreign capitalists in the home country. And, on the other side, imports, loans to other capitalist groups, income from foreign investments in the home country which goes abroad and overseas investments. These accounts are generally divided into two parts: the actual balance of trade (exports and imports) and what in Britain is called the “capital account” which records loans and investments. The balance of payments as a whole must, in accordance with simple accounting principles, balance. A deficit in the balance of trade, for instance, must be made by a surplus on the so-called capital account. Balance of payments difficulties arise when payments continuously exceed receipts. Before the last World War the deficit in the balance of trade of the British capitalist class was matched by an inflow of Profits and Interest from overseas. However, many of these overseas investments had to be sold to pay for their war. As a result at the end of the war the British capitalists found that they couldn’t go on as before: now they had to try to eliminate the trade deficit altogether by increasing exports. This is their much-publicised “exports problem.” The position of British capitalists is further complicated by the fact that its currency, Sterling, is one of the international means of payment and also by the fact that they act as bankers to a whole group of capitalist states known as the Sterling Area.
No group of capitalists can go on running a balance of payments deficit without in the end risking bankruptcy. There are various measures that can be taken to try to avoid this dire result (though, of course, the ups and downs of industrial production and trade mainly depend on factors which governments can’t control): loans from other groups of capitalists, cut down imports, try to increase exports and to reduce costs. Devaluation, which involves making it cheaper for foreigners to buy Pounds Sterling, and thus making British exports more attractive in the World Market.
When the Labour Party took over the management of the common affairs of the British capitalists last October, they were immediately faced with a serious balance of payments problem: imports rising, reserves falling, confidence in Sterling disappearing. As they themselves have since revealed they considered that their first duty was to “Save the Pound.” They got a loan from the International Monetary Fund, put on the import surcharges and the like. Most of their promised social reform schemes were “postponed” under the excuse of “clearing up the mess the Tories left.” Since then a major part of their economic policy has been directed to “saving the Pound,” from Wilson’s picas for a New Britain with boardrooms full of fighting go-ahead managers and salesmen and factories full of hard-working, docile workers who have abandoned strikes, tea-breaks and clock-watching, to Brown’s futile prices and incomes policy. The emphasis is always the same: old attitudes must go, British capitalism can’t afford anything which increases costs from expense account lunches to Trade Unions using their economic strength to the fullest.
The general logic of this policy flows from the (correct) assumption that the continued employment of the working class depends on the continued prosperity of the capitalist class; thus to keep full employment, it is argued, the Government has to take measures to preserve prosperity (including using armed force to protect oil in South Arabia and copper, tin and rubber in Malaya) and avoid measures which threaten to upset it (like expensive and interfering social reform schemes). This might be reasonable if you accept, as the Labour Party does, that the working class must for ever be dependent on the capitalist class.
After all it was Marx himself who wrote that an “indispensible condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is the fastest possible growth of productive capital.” But this is merely the result of the utter dependence of the working class on the capitalist for a living in the first place. This is a dependence which Socialists say amounts to enslavement. We are wage-slaves, condemned to work all our lives for the capitalists in return for a wage or salary. But more than this we can only find employment when our masters can sell what we produce, when they are prosperous and affluent. Socialists say that this economic dependence on the capitalist class can and should be ended. Socialists have always urged workers to realise that their interests are completely opposed to those of their employers and to pursue policies in line with this. On the economic field the conscious pursuit of this class struggle involves using the trade unions to fight and improve wages and conditions all the time; and on the political field an organised struggle in an uncomprising Socialist Party for the conquest of political power in order to achieve Socialism.
Once it is realised that society is not one happy family with a common interest, but rather is composed of two hostile groups then it can be seen how dangerous from the working-class point of view are the Labour Party pleas for hard work, moderation in wage demands and co-operation with capitalist enterprises (“enlightened management and co¬operative labour” is what Callaghan once called for). For if accepted this would amount to a complete capitulation to the capitalist class. The Labour Party is, in fact, saying, “If you want to exist under capitalism you must do so on capitalism’s terms, so WORK HARD, DON’T STRIKE, CO-OPERATE.” Socialists have heard this before and have always fought against this servile attitude. Under capitalism the working class must struggle; they have no choice as their economic position forces them to—this, in fact, is why this particular policy of the Labour Government must fail.
Exports, gold reserves and balance of payments only come into this insofar as the prosperity and affluence of the capitalist class in Britain—and so also the continued employment of us their slaves—is particularly dependent on its overseas trade. Today the workers are slaves whose interest it is to organise and struggle to free themselves. Once this is realised then it becomes obvious that exports and the like are not problems that concern the working class at all.
RACHMAN AND RENT CONTROL
In the May SOCIALIST STANDARD in a discussion of the Milner Holland Report we drew attention, as an example of the futility of reformism, to the fact that operators like Rachman were the products in part of rent control. A recent pamphlet by the Conservative Political Centre, Target for Homes, now says:
“The particularly unpleasant strong-arm practices associated with the name of Rachman resulted from control and not from decontrol. It was only the enormous financial attraction of vacant possession that rendered it so profitable to use these unconscionable pressures to get rid of controlled tenants. If there had been no rent control and no controlled tenants this particular exercise would have had no conceivable purpose. And it is significant that Rachman’s operations started some years before the 1957 Rent Act and ceased very shortly after it was passed—long before his activities became public” (p.44).
A.L.B.