The Socialist Issue 150March 24th 2000 |
Fight every Job Loss |
Rover shop stewards have committed themselves to fighting all the way the break-up of the company: “the works committee is in favour of the government taking over Longbridge and Rover and putting proper investment in to build new models.” |
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The Government starves public services and blames refugees. Wherever you look in the media, from TV news to the smallest local paper, there are negative stories about asylum seekers. |
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“FROM EACH according to ability, to each according to need” - this is how Karl Marx characterised the way a socialist economy will work. But far from being preposterous or utopian, as the supporters of capitalism argue, such a vision of socialism is a practical and realisable alternative to the horrors of the market system. |
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TONY BLAIR supposedly shook with anger when told of BMW’s plans to shut Rover. Maybe it was fear at the workers’ anger that will be directed at this government. |
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KEN LIVINGSTONE’S present-day popularity comes partly from the perception of his battles against Thatcher’s Tories as Greater London Council (GLC) leader from 1981 to 1986. |
Fight every Job Loss
AFTER THE BMW bosses sold Rover to vulture capitalists Alchemy, thousands of jobs in Rover’s West Midlands plants were threatened. Cowley works in Oxford also cut production by over 50%.
Cost-cutting bosses threaten similar devastation to other workplaces, such as Harland and Wolff in Belfast. The capitalist class threaten what little remains of British manufacturing industry.
What’s going to happen to Rover workers? A Longbridge night-shift worker told The Socialist that ever since the first threats last year, he’d been looking for another job. But his local JobCentre only offers jobs on the national minimum wage (£3.60 an hour).
The Rover worker currently gets £8 an hour and he’s got three young kids. How could he afford to live if he got made redundant?
The hype around the budget, that it was a give-away budget, was a con. Brown’s ‘prudence’ has come from depriving public spending of £40 billion in the past four years. Public-sector workers have suffered for that.
Meanwhile Brown’s budget threatened unemployed people. It extended the New Deal scheme to the long-term adult unemployed and many lone parents.
How long will it be before workers like those at Rover, on being made redundant, have to go straight onto this pay-cutting scheme? Unemployed people who refuse any job offered to them could face getting their benefits removed.
Workers at Rover are fighting back with protests. They can see that capitalism has no answers. The unions must mobilise their members to fight every threat to jobs.
The whole workforce, backed by their local communities, must unite to force the Labour government to nationalise Rover and any other company which threatens mass lay-offs.
JOIN THE fight to save Rover! Join the demo organised by Rover shop stewards. Saturday 1 April. Assemble 10amat Jennens Road, off Masshouse Circus. March to Cannon Hill Park for 1pm Rally, (opposite Edgbaston cricket ground), Birmingham.
Government starves public services and blames refugees:
Build unity against Labour attacks
WHEREVER YOU look in the media, from TV news to the smallest local paper, there are negative stories about asylum seekers.
By Naomi Byron
The hatred poured out against asylum seekers today starkly contrasts with media coverage of the Kosovar Albanian refugees only a year ago. Then even the Daily Mail publicly demanded that the government allow tens of thousands of refugees into Britain.
Why the change? Has the worldwide refugee crisis suddenly been solved and so the only people applying for asylum are frauds? Has there been a halt in “ethnic cleansing”, war, environmental disasters and repression?
Working-class people are increasingly angry and frustrated at New Labour’s continued betrayal of their interests. The government could use their £10 billion budget surplus to raise living standards for the poorest.
Instead, aided by the media, they spread lies that asylum seekers are taking money that they would have otherwise spent on public services.
Cuts in social spending by New Labour are down to their pro-big business agenda - this is what lies behind council tax increases.
The housing crisis has been caused by government spending cuts of £3 billion a year since the 1970s not by the relatively small numbers of asylum seekers to this country.
The bill for asylum seekers 18 months ago was only £0.5 billion. This would make little difference to public spending elsewhere compared to the £10 billion handed over to big business in corporation tax cuts.
New Labour’s immigration policies encourage people to feel they can get away with openly racist views.
Barry Hearn, chairman of Leyton Orient football club, said on a Radio 5 Live phone-in that it was “disgraceful that we let all these people into the country. It’s about time we started looking after ourselves. I wouldn’t have one of them in.”
Hearn only made one exception - boxers like ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed, who he promotes, would be welcome “because they make me money”.
If there are fraudulent asylum claims it is because it has been made virtually impossible for genuine refugees to gain asylum. Only 7% of asylum applications processed in February this year were accepted. A new detention centre specifically for refugees has been opened up near Cambridge.
Thousands more traumatised and desperate refugees will be imprisoned in conditions not much different from those of convicted criminals but without being given any reason for their detention, any date for release or right of appeal.
We are all angry at the failure of the government to represent our interests. But we need to argue against their attempts to exploit tensions between asylum seekers and the existing population.
We need unity to fight for proper public services available to everyone and against divisive and racist immigration laws.
“FROM EACH according to ability, to each according to need” - this is how Karl Marx characterised the way a socialist economy will work. But far from being preposterous or utopian, as the supporters of capitalism argue, such a vision of socialism is a practical and realisable alternative to the horrors of the market system. PETE DICKENSON explains.
How a socialist planned economy could work
THE COLLAPSE of the planned economies in Eastern Europe ten years ago resulted in a tidal wave of pro-capitalist market propaganda against so-called socialist economies. Politicians and economists alike argued that planning was dead and that the ‘free market’ of capitalism was triumphant.
All of these individuals had a vested interest in upholding the capitalist system which accumulates private property and profits for an elite in society while the mass of the population struggle to survive.
Capitalism is a system that works on privilege and coercion. but its defenders argue that it is the only economic system that works.
This has caused many workers also to be sceptical about whether socialism could work. The Stalinist soviet economies were a caricature of socialism, which initially achieved economic growth but lacked the workers participation and democracy that would have allowed a genuine socialist democracy to thrive. Instead the bureaucratic elites that controlled those societies drove the economies to collapse.
Now sections of workers, increasingly disenchanted with capitalism, are looking for an alternative socialist way of organising the economy. So what are the general principles on which a genuine, democratic socialist economy will be built?
Where will the resources for a socialist planned economy come from?
THIS IS a question that is commonly asked and the answer can be divided into several categories:
a) By the elimination of unemployment. We now have again what Marx called ‘a permanent army of unemployed’ in the advanced capitalist countries. In Britain in the present ‘boom’ the jobless rate is still nearly two million, whose cost in terms of lost production and benefit payments has been estimated at £5,000 a family per year.
Even at the height of an upturn industry never works at full capacity. A planned economy will be able to guarantee work for everyone, with retraining provided to make sure the new jobs are meeting the needs of people, democratically determined.
b) Luxury expenditure for the rich will be ended. The capitalist experts are always keen to point out that ending the wealth of the rich will not solve the problems of society, because however obscenely well off they are, there are not enough of them to make a big difference. Nevertheless, the rich do consume 5% of national income which amounts to £40 billion a year in Britain, a significant sum that would begin the process of transforming the NHS.
c) Ending arms spending. On a world scale the waste of resources on arms is vast, reaching nearly $1 trillion each year at the end of the cold war - approximately $1,000 a year for every family on the planet. This money would be a big first step in lifting the majority of the world’s population out of grinding poverty.
Although redeploying millions of highly skilled arms workers will be a formidable task, under capitalism such a transformation will never take place. This is because the reason for arms expenditure will not disappear, ie the hostility between rival capitalist countries, and because the market system could not plan the transfer of resources needed due to its anarchic nature.
d) Eliminating the waste of capitalism. The world is dominated by a handful of multinational corporations who duplicate expenditure in research and development, spend unnecessary vast sums on advertising and design products with planned obsolescence. For example, rival drug companies spend billions on developing varieties of pain killers with marginally different effectiveness.
e) Freeing the creative power of the working class. Workers in the market system have no incentive in putting in their energies to help out the bosses. But in a socialist society it will be possible to release the creative instincts of employees because no fundamental conflict of interests will exist.
It is often said by management theorists that the real experts in any firm when a problem needs to be solved are the workers themselves.
Although a factor which is difficult to quantify, in the long run this will be a very significant advantage of socialism.
What is Socialist Planning?
WHAT DOES planning actually consist of? It is allocating resources of labour and materials for the production of goods and services for the benefit of society as a whole, rather than to make profits for the capitalists. It will operate at three levels, nationally (and internationally), at industry or sectoral level and at the individual enterprise.
a) The overall performance of the economy will be decided at the national (and international) level. There will be targets for productivity growth, investment, consumption etc, which will be determined democratically by institutions created after the overthrow of capitalism. Here the decisions about the priorities that society wants to have, for example between health expenditure or housing, will be made.
b) Industry or sectoral level. It will be necessary to determine consumer demand for the goods or services of that particular industry and to organise the efficient exchange of materials and semi-finished products with other sectors eg from suppliers.
The determination of demand will be done by obtaining information from powerful, democratically representative consumer bodies and by using the very sophisticated tools for market research developed under capitalism. To organise the movement of goods between industries, avoiding bottlenecks, it will be possible to use the techniques, such as operational research, developed by the big capitalist monopolies to plan the complex movement of goods between their operations around the world.
c) Planning at the enterprise level. The methods mentioned in above will also be used here to determine consumer needs and preferences. It is also likely that as far as enterprises making consumer products are concerned (as opposed to capital goods - machinery etc used in the production process - manufacturers) a type of market system will be retained in the early stages of the transition from capitalism.
This could operate through small businesses or worker co-ops, but only within the framework of a nationalised economy. If the market sector was too large it would threaten to impose its inherent inequalities onto society.
What do the critics say about it?
SINCE MARX’S day, and particularly since the Russian Revolution, academics have written libraries full of books about why socialism won’t work.
One of the main criticisms is that planning the efficient allocation of resources is impossible because of the vast complexity of modern industrial society, where millions of economic transactions take place every day. However, most of these economic interactions are between enterprises, they do not involve consumers, and it is quite clear that present-day multinational firms conduct planning of a similar complexity all the time.
The activity of the multinationals answers a further criticism that the operation of supply and demand to determine price is the only efficient way to proceed in the exchange of goods. In their international operations companies like General Motors simply allocate resources between countries and factories without reference to the market.
As far as planning for consumer needs are concerned the key point is that active democratic institutions should exist that can compel the planning bodies to respond to their demands. In addition to this, techniques such as market research and using the internet will ease the tasks faced by future socialist planners.
It is important, though, not to exaggerate the role that will be played by the internet or look for a ‘technical fix’; the existence of democratic institutions will be paramount.
The role of democratically elected and powerful consumer bodies will also make sure that shoddy goods are not produced and that quality is maintained. Here as well the advances in modern production management techniques can be applied, since the future socialist society will inherit, unlike the Soviet Union, a quality culture associated with the highest levels of technique developed by capitalism.
The quote from Marx at the beginning of this article implies that there will be a super-abundance of goods and services under socialism which will not require rationing by price (and therefore the existence of money) as under capitalism. This is completely feasible once the constraints imposed by the market system are removed and the creative energies of the working class unleashed.
The concept of super-abundance, however, raises one of the most serious criticisms of the socialist project, namely environmental destruction caused by consuming energy and resources at the rate of the advanced capitalist countries.
Socialism will not work unless the standard of living of the world’s poor majority is raised to that of the industrialised countries causing energy consumption to rise very sharply. This will not result in environmental disaster however.
In the first place, there is an enormous waste of energy in the industrialised countries, particularly in the USA. Without affecting living standards, energy consumption could be reduced by up to 50% if appropriate investment is made.
Secondly, using fossil fuel is the key problem. Expansion will have to be based on other sources of energy. The technology for this exists now in the form of wave, wind and solar energy, but it will need huge investments to implement the change.
Under a socialist planned economy, a large impetus will be given to the development of science and technology leading to new non-polluting energy sources being developed.
Although the introduction of a democratically planned socialist economy will not be without difficulties, it is important not to exaggerate them since the doubts arise largely because the barrage of hostile propaganda from the capitalist class. The arguments for a new way of organising society will find a growing and receptive audience in the coming years.
Nationalise Rover
TONY BLAIR supposedly shook with anger when told of BMW’s plans to shut Rover. Maybe it was fear at the workers’ anger that will be directed at this government.
Longbridge workers accepted 1,500 redundancies in June 1999 to “make their jobs safe” or so they were told by union leaders like Ken Jackson and Tony Woodley of the TGWU union. Many workers didn’t believe their assurances even then and these union leaders were booed and jeered at a mass meeting. Only the intervention of a senior BMW official that allowed these union leaders to carry the vote to accept the plan.
When the bosses came back for another 2,400 redundancies last October, the same union leaders told them that “it was the only way”.
Workers at the plant believe it should be business as usual and that they don’t want anything to do with this asset-stripping company, Alchemy
The New Labour government, the most vigorous advocates of the global capitalist market, were trampled on and treated with contempt by BMW and are squirming with embarrassment at their blind faith in capitalism.
BMW have already axed 10,000 jobs. Up to 50,000 jobs could go in the West Midlands alone. But the Labour government claims it is impotent in the face of this catastrophe.
Faced with a similar situation in the 1970s, the Heath Tory government nationalised Rolls-Royce in 24 hours to save jobs. But Blair’s government’s allegiance to the capitalist system means it won’t lift a finger to save one job.
Rover workers must demand that their unions turn action into deeds and launch a programme of action to defend every job. This should include:
* No job losses, no asset stripping of Longbridge and Rover.
* No breaking up of Rover and sale of Land Rover to Ford.
* No transfer of Mini production from Longbridge to Cowley without the agreement of the workers.
* End business secrets. Open the books to find out what has happened to all the profits and government aid of the last 20 years.
* Rover’s renationalisation under democratic workers’ control and management.
When Cuddly Ken was Red Ken
KEN LIVINGSTONE’S present-day popularity comes partly from the perception of his battles against Thatcher’s Tories as Greater London Council (GLC) leader from 1981 to 1986.
By Roger Shrives
In October 1981 the GLC introduced Fare’s Fair, a radical policy to cut London’s transport fares, subsidising them through the rates.
Tory Bromley council took the GLC to court over Fare’s Fair and the Law Lords abolished the scheme as ‘illegal’ in December 1981. Fares were forced up until Livingstone negotiated a new compromise a year later, which only partly restored some of the GLC’s reforms.
Socialist Party members (then Militant supporters) argued at the time that Livingstone and other GLC leaders needed to develop a strategy to mobilise mass opposition to the Tories.
Militant supporters wrote a section of the 1981 GLC manifesto which pointed out that Tory governments don’t listen to pleas, only to pressure.
It said that if the GLC faced government opposition it must “appeal to the labour and trade union movement to support its stand. Mass opposition to Tory policies led by a Labour GLC could become a focal point of a national campaign involving other Labour councils, against the cuts.”
On Fare’s Fair Livingstone unfortunately didn’t mobilise the opposition of the unions who faced job losses but relied on using PR agencies, publicity and lobbying campaigns. Nonetheless, many Londoners still remember this period affectionately.
The policies of Livingstone and other left leaders (with the exception of Liverpool and Lambeth) led to serious failings in the next big battle.
From 1983 Thatcher wanted to abolish the metropolitan county councils, especially the GLC, and crush the independence of all local authorities by ‘capping’ rates (the pre-poll tax local property tax).
This policy cut central government support for local councils. It tried to make ratepayers, especially the middle class, rebel against ‘high-spending’ left councils.
LIVERPOOL COUNCIL, where Militant supporters had a sizeable influence, fought Thatcher’s plans boldly. It led a mass movement of the unions and local residents, including huge demonstrations.
They fought to set a deficit budget, a policy of maintaining jobs and services, not by pushing up rates but by demanding that the government fund their deficit. This was very popular and mobilised support for the council on the basis of specific proposals such as a massive housebuilding programme.
If other Labour councils had followed such a programme and linked it to mass action, including strikes, this could have spearheaded a real fightback by local Labour councils.
The GLC and other soft-left led councils had a policy of refusing to set a rate. This made it harder to co-ordinate different councils’ opposition as every council would have a different date of bankruptcy.
They also favoured a fall-back of massive rate rises, which put much of the cost back onto ordinary working-class people.
However, if the councils had stood together, Thatcher’s talk of surcharging and bankrupting rebel councillors would have been idle threats.
Livingstone, unfortunately, offered merely symbolic opposition including sending Valentine’s cards of protests to Tory ministers. Even when the Tories stripped the GLC of powers such as education (the Inner London Education Authority [ILEA] was Britain’s biggest) and then abolished it, there was no attempt to build a genuine mass struggle against it.
In March 1985, the GLC and ILEA led the left councils’ retreat. Livingstone fixed a rate which included cuts, blaming other London boroughs for leaving them isolated, which was nonsense as one London borough, Hackney, had refused to set a rate only the week before.
In fact the GLC leaders were anxious to avoid battle with the government, fearing legal action from the Tories, including a five-year ban on holding public office. The next year, 1986, the Tories abolished the GLC and ILEA.
Liverpool and Lambeth were still fighting. The GLC’s defection delighted the Tories and cost the councils which kept up resistance - and their workers - dearly. By the end of 1985, even Liverpool had had to make a tactical retreat and local councils were subsequently reduced to mere appendages of central government.
Livingstone, even in his left-wing days, never saw the need to build a movement amongst the working class. Workers are still paying for that misjudgement.
Liverpool: The City that Dared to Fight by Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn - available from Socialist Books, £6.95, 020 8988 8789.