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WHAT THE 'LEFT' HAVE TO SAY ABOUT IT
The situation that confronted the TUC, CBI and Government was this: the power of the working class in the economic struggle determined that the amount of value the bourgeoisie could appropriate was insufficient to ensure reproduction let alone growth of capital in Britain. The consumption of the working class today meant that there would be no capital to provide means of production for the working class to use in producing value tomorrow. There can be no working class consumption if there is no means of production with which to produce consumption goods. The Left have been trumpeting the true message loud and clear since the summer: it is the working class's right to increase its wages and that right must be defended against wage freezes etc or else its present standard of consumption will be attacked by the Tory sharks. The limitation of wages is a clear-cut act of greed and vendetta thought up by the employers because they dislike the working class. To actually agree with the Government, TUC and CBI that there is a problem is an act of treachery against the working class's true interests:
"Heath is laughing his head off, because the TUC leaders are taking part in a political ploy which he has thought up for the benefit of the Tory Government and the employers whom it represents ... At this moment of greatest difficulty, when opposition to Tory policies is mounting on issue after issue it (a voluntary agreement, NS) would be like a lifeline to save a sinking Government. It would not only be a stab in the back for millions of workers who are rightly fighting for pay demands far in excess of what either Heath or the TUC General Council has suggested as the 'norm'. It would also be a blow against the Labour and Communist members and supporters who are campaigning to force the resignation of the Government and defeat the Tories in a General Election. TUC leaders try to justify their decision to go into the Chequers talks with the argument that if they can get the Government to agree to increase pensions, take some steps to moderate price and rent rises, and not use the Industrial Relations Act, it will be worth while to surrender the right to bargain for the best possible wages. But trade unionists have the right to demand all these things, and use their strength to compel the Government to grant them, without any qualifications or conditions." (Morning Star, 26.10.72)
"Suddenly everyone's concerned about the low paid. Millions of working people have suffered for years under the burden of near-starvation wages. Successive governments have done nothing to help them - on the contrary, their policies have further depressed the wage levels of the poor. ...But now scarcely a day passes without a weeping politician or newspaper tycoon beating his breast about the plight of the low paid. Is it a deathbed conversion to the cause of decency on the part of the Tories and their press friends - or is it just a cheap propaganda device to sell the swindle of the pay and prices freeze?... The freeze must be smashed. There is only one way to do it - by industrial action. Talks, petitions, lobbies of parliament will not budge this arrogant and vicious government of big business interests ... Such action must grow and multiply. A concerted movement can defeat the Tories' aims. We must demand of our union leaders that they take the initiative in organising widespread strikes to pursue and obtain every wage demand in defiance of the 'counter-inflation' law. But as their recent record proves, it would be futile to wait for them to issue such a call." (Socialist Worker leader, 25.11.72. NB. I omitted no substantive points from this leader. It simply makes the statements that the Freeze "must'' be smashed and action against it "must grow and multiply". The only reason discernible from the leader is that the Queen and stockbrokers earn more than farm workers and farm workers are more essential to society and therefore entitled to earn more.)
"Heath's 'anti-inflation' plan is nothing more than an attempt to con millions of workers into accepting a cut in their living standards ... If the government's plan is accepted, anyone earning around the average industrial wage can expect to see the value of this take-home pay fall steadily from now on. Where will this buying power go? Not to the lower paid, as we have shown. Instead it will automatically boost company profits and serve to increase dividends and profits. And the Tories have not even made the pretence of restraining these." (SW, 30.9.72)
MARX ON THE GOTHA PROGRAMME
It is instructive to read what Marx had to say about the plank in the Gotha Programme which stated that:
"'The emancipation of labour demands the promotion of the instruments of labour to the common property of society and the co-operative regulation of the total labour with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour.' ...
"Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is 'fair'? And is it not, in fact, the only 'fair' distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about 'fair' distribution? ... But 'all members of society' and 'equal right' are obviously mere phrases . The kernel consists in this, that in this communist society every worker must receive the 'undiminished' Lasallean 'proceeds of labour'. Let us take first of all the words 'proceeds of labour' in the sense of the product of labour; then the co-operative proceeds of labour are the total social product. From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Secondly, additional portion for expansion of production. Thirdly reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc. These deductions from the 'undiminished proceeds of labour' are an economic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity.
"There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption. Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production ... Secondly, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. . . Thirdly, funds for those unable to work, etc...Only now do we come to the 'distribution' which the programme, under Lassallean influence, alone has in view in its narrow fashion, namely, to that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society. The 'undiminished proceeds of labour' have already unnoticeably become converted into the 'diminished' proceeds, although what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society ...
"Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society (in a communist society "not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society" - NS) - after the deductions have been made - exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour ... Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulated the exchange of commodities, as far as this is the exchange of equal values ... Hence, equal right here is still in principle - bourgeois right ...This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored ...
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society ... Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby ... I have dealt more at length with the 'undiminished proceeds of labour', on the one hand, and with 'equal right' and 'fair distribution', on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instil into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French Socialists." (Critique of Gotha Programme, pp 13-17, Progress Publishers pamphlet, 1966.)
Perhaps the CPGB and IS [International Socialism, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party] believe that British capitalism is endowed with supernatural powers of which Marx had no inkling let alone analysis. This is the only logical conclusion from their exhortations to the working class which it is possible to draw. 'You have the power to consume everything you produce and therefore it is your right to do so'. It of course follows that every item which Marx enumerated above which had to be deducted before the working class's consumption of its product has also to be deducted under capitalism out of the workers' consumption (under capitalism remember the working class is the only source of value.) The much-vaunted inequalities in distribution of wealth between the working class and the bourgeoisie are indeed inequalities of wealth and not consumption. Lord Stokes certainly does not consume the value of all British Leyland's factories in one year, though he owns them. Nor indeed does he consume all the steel etc which are the raw materials for the cars BL workers produce. Far and away the main consumers in our society are the working class. Wages and salaries account for 6l% of the society's annual production. Inequalities of distribution of consumption may outrage the moral sensibilities of IS and the CPGB; their redistribution will not make provision for the reproduction of society or even a much increased working class consumption. It is quite true that the bourgeoisie's interest in an incomes policy is the survival of capitalism.
It is equally true that the alternative which the CP and IS put forward is that capitalism has no right to reproduce itself and the working class has a right to consume all its production. Perhaps IS and the CP believe that socialism will be like that - Marx certainly did not and was clear that such ideas were reactionary. But then perhaps the IS and CP view is in fact in tune with their moral conception of the working class: i.e. if it consumes all its product this time round, the next time round it will starve. But after all it will be pure in its starvation because it will have refused to surrender one tittle of its product to the bourgeoisie in the form of profits. As profits are the root of all evil, the working class simply does away with them and in so doing purges the society of its sin ... and its means of survival.
In this situation such ideas have the effect of obscuring one of the central features of capitalism - that the appropriation of surplus value from the working class is necessary to capitalism's (and society's) survival. Moreover, it is a central feature that has been forced into the political arena to be discussed and considered by both classes openly because of the growth of the working class's political power. (See the Brittan quotes earlier in this article about why the market cannot be let rip to solve inflation if you are in doubt on this point).
The bourgeoisie have not asked the working class to reduce its level of consumption. Heath's calculations for the package deal were made using the 6l% figure as given; as stated in the October Communist, the increase in profits will not come at the expense of working class consumption but through the utiIisation of spare capacity and increased productivity that always accompanies expansion in a capitalist economy. If there is one thing that this Conservative Government is clear on it is that the economy will be put on an expansionary course insofar as Government action is able to ensure this (e.g. by refusing to let a crisis in sterling appear). The real income of the working class will also increase in an expansionary situation since the 61% will represent more production. The redistribution of consumption towards the lower paid was in the package deal at the trade unions' instance; that the lower paid should be given more 'justice'. The bourgeoisie simply made the point that that justice must come from the redistribution of working class's consumption: there was simply no more slack.
At this point in time, the alternative is very clear: either there is some form of incomes policy or the level of consumption of the working class will indeed deteriorate because capitalists will start going out of business in a big way through lack of capital. There will be unemployment and hardship in the working class engendered not through bourgeois meanness but through the refusal of the working class to face up to the realities of capitalism. The working class lose nothing by doing so: they sign away no right, they lose no power. Indeed the working class gains. Not merely in terms of its increased level of consumption but also in its understanding of capitalism.