A Different Kind of Life

Socialism is not a political abstraction but a statement of here and now. Nearly all the questions and arguments thrust at Socialists resolve to a single one “What does it offer to me ?” The idea that offers have to be made is a mental habit acquired from capitalist politics — but one which implies the room for improvement to be, always, enormous.

To all of you: we are offering and promising nothing. Your first understanding must be that the different world so direly needed has to be made by you the multitude, not us the handful. If offers are thought of, of course it is the cut-price bird in the hand that will clutched every time. But don’t you wonder why the offer always turns out a swindle? For the last generation the bird in hand has been rising living standards, made a banquet by the Welfare State’s red wine. Look at them and the society in which they have gone sour, and you see what Socialism is all about.

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The anticipations of the “never-had-it-so-good” era faded away abruptly. On one hand the Welfare State has failed, except in proliferating bureaucracy; on another there is the endless poverty, the cry all through society that ends can’t be met. People have ceased to point out that an unemployed man with a family can get twenty-five pounds a week in social security payments because it is seen — more and more often — that wages for innumerable workers are below even that figure. The drastic measures taken by the last Wilson government, deliberately creating unemployment and setting back wages, show the extent to which the Labour Party has fallen away from the humanism which. even if only in talk, once characterized it. Previous Labour governments had unemployment and economic crises, but they apologized and tried to excuse themselves; this one calculated the number it should have out of work and how long they should remain so.

The means by which depression and destitution were said to be being overcome in the ’fifties have rebounded. Credit and hire-purchase, the agencies through which working people were “improving their standards”, provide not only private millstones but instruments for the regulation of domestic consumption and the direction of labour. An increase in the statutory deposit for certain classes of good has the automatic effect of making them unpurchasable even on hire-purchase for the time, and so reducing production in — say — furniture factories to make part of their labour-force redundant and available for work elsewhere.

Likewise in the nineteen-fifties it was widely said that social barriers were disappearing. The fact that rich and poor read the same newspapers and watched the same television programmes was held to be the sign of an equalization of culture; working-class access to domestic comforts and leisure-time enjoyments, the beginning of the end of private privilege. What has emerged has been the drawing of new lines. If anything, the social-group divisions are now tighter and more numerous than before. They can be seen at work in the rapid destruction of country-village life, for instance. Today the cottages and houses are taken over by executive and professional townspeople who recognize only their own kind, and the villagers are herded into the rural council-house estates which are virtually their ghettoes.

The apparent social inroads have only set up more divisions. A package holiday abroad may be a pleasurable change, but its social status is on a level with a trip to Brighton. The proletarian stigmata are not permitted to be erased. The phrase “permissive society” for certain phenomena in the last few years is a giveaway as to the sort of society we are really living in. As apparent barriers have broken down, restrictive laws have been steadily extended : permission is given, but under supervision and on the condition of instant withdrawal when thought necessary.

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That is all workaday and domestic living. What of the great issues and questions for humanity ? The keynote of the nineteen-fifties’ apathy was struck by Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger — “There aren’t any good, brave causes any more”. There was, of course, the hydrogen bomb; it has now receded in people’s consciousness, the Vietnam war perhaps taken as a confirmation that the powers would simply never dare to use it. Vietnam itself was a fertile source of indignation and protest from mixed motives: human compassion, dismay at the cynicism of governments, anti-Americanism and desire for the Communists to win were all present in the rallies and the fights round Grosvenor Square.

The Socialist Standard was the only paper to remark, at the height of anti-nuclear feeling, what was the truly terrifying thing about the hydrogen bomb — that the world could be scourged and devastated by weapons of war without it. Less than twenty years later there is a still more terrifying thought, as evidence has accumulated of the effects of everyday pollution of the environment — the world can be equally scourged without war at all. There is, too, at this moment talk of a world-wide economic crisis on the scale of 1929 against whose onset the political and economic wisdom of capitalism is powerless.

What can be done about any or all of these things? They are not even problems in the sense of housing, or traffic, or the care of the old, where the hope that legislation can mitigate may be mistaken but is understandable; they are part of the condition of humanity now. Of course there are protests and demands. The protests, however, tend to be a matter of affirming self-respect and decent feelings more than anything else I have stood up and testified, runs the sentiment, so what is happening today is not my fault. Some time ago a Labour MP spoke to the writer of having given up the Vietnam crusade: “What can you do about Vietnam ? Nothing!”

It depends on what you want to do. Hopes for social reform are usually fragmentary or one-eyed; they concern themselves with a single outstanding evil, or are limited to a belief (for example) that people must be made better before the world will change much. If it is possible to find an umbrella covering all aspirations for a humane society, the nearest idea is that of choice. It is only in this context that the word “freedom” makes sense : freedom to choose. The objection to authority and coercion is precisely that they deny choice and impose someone else’s. Racialism and war are ultimates in the repudiation of choice — born on the wrong side, one forfeits the right to participation in society or even to live. Poverty denies choice; not only in the sense that if one is poor there is going to be bread-and-margarine, but in reference to work, housing, education, leisure activities and personal relationships.

The inference (as taken up by many “libertarians”) might be that what one has to do, then, is attack social evils and seek to extend areas of choice for everyone as far as possible. Paradoxically, it is impossible to do that in a class-divided — and therefore basically unfree — society. If an estate is built to rehouse people in a pleasant area, everyone who can afford it in the neighbourhood will promptly move away, making the estate automatically a colony of inferiors. Part of the bitterness over the Welfare State is that, though it was hailed as a national effort transcending individual status, it has never been seen as anything but sectional — a tax, more or less, on the comfortable and a bounty to the poor.

Nor is it feasible to try to legislate against a problem like pollution. There are, of course, partial approaches to it. A few rural districts with small populations have built sludge de-watering plants, where sewage effluent is transformed into a dry cake usable as a low-grade organic fertilizer; though the expense for urban areas would be gigantic. Likewise, a different and costlier composition for detergents would stop their contribution to the pollution of rivers. But if alternative techniques for all contaminatory industrial processes were found, the criterion is not going to be human wellbeing but “viability” — how much will it cost ?

What is there to say of such a problem except that it is inseparable from production for profit ? Though popular awareness of it is recent, it is simply the development of what has been going on throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If one adds to it the other chronic problems of the modern world — the crisis-producing imbalances of production which are part of the nature of capitalism, the international rivalries and tensions and the dreadful consequences when tension breaks — these alone press a majestic case for a fundamental alteration in society. When is added the failure of capitalism to house, feed, educate or make happy vast numbers of people, or to give any degree of choice — the case becomes overwhelming.

The argument for Socialism is that the problems will cease to exist and freedom of choice be given, only on the terms of common ownership of all the means of living. Production for use means production unconfined by the market as to either distribution or cost. On one hand there would be free access to the wealth of society; on the other, cost and competition would not oppose themselves to human wellbeing. The material fears of loss of work, housing or status that largely underlie racialism would disappear with every other kind of superiority-distinction. So would the pressures which continually crush the quality of personal life. Indeed, if common ownership is seen as the means and not the end, Socialism appears not simply as the solution but as many thousands of solutions : the facility from which progress, in the true sense, may begin.

R.B.

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