The socialist alternative
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
Paul Clarke looks at what Labour ought to be saying, but won't
Things fall apart
A VISITOR from Mars would be gobsmacked. The election is being held in a society falling apart. Thirteen years of Thatcherism have greatly deepened the chronic crisis of British capitalism. Britain today is in deep decay – decaying industry, decaying living standards, decaying health and social services.
The country's whole infrastructure – its industry, communications, schools, hospitals, transport – need totally renewing. Yet none of the major political parties challenges the absurd idea that the capitalist market can solve these problems.
Labour is standing on its least radical programme since the second world war. In 1974 it promised 'a fundamental shift in wealth and power to working people'. In 1983 its manifesto contained dozens of radical reforming proposals. But today's Labour leadership is a model of pro-market, tight money, rectitude.
That is the measure of Thatcherism's impact on British politics. Successive defeats inflicted on the trade unions above all in the miners' strike, created the basis for the crushing and marginalisation of the Labour left.
Nowhere is this more vividly shown than in local government. Yesterday's radical municipal socialists are today's local Kinnockite apparatchiks, cutting jobs and services with cynical glee. Erstwhile Bennite crusaders like Margaret Beckett sit on the Labour front bench preaching orthodox monetarism.
Thus the door to radical politics stays firmly shut in Labour's new orthodoxy. But there is a socialist answer. The crisis can only be solved by making a radical break with pro-market politics.
Socialist Movement
If there is a hung parliament with Labour the largest party, socialists must demand that Labour fronts a minority government. But there is still the possibility of an outright Labour victory.
If Kinnock becomes prime minister, the left must regroup and build broad support from a charter of alternative, anti-capitalist policies. The Socialist Movement could play a major role in organising such an opposition in every part of the labour movement.
Such a programme of demands would necessarily be limited to a few key demands which break the logic of pro-capitalist politics. But today socialists must elaborate their own answers, not just bemoan the fact that Kinnock has none.
A Barlow Clowes society
Tory Britain is a rip-off society. A few spectacular rip-offs make the headlines, while the daily rip-off by big business, financiers, insurance companies and stockbrokers go unreported.
Dozens of people are being imprisoned for poll-tax non-payment. At the moment people owing £300 get around five weeks. Financier John Barlow, kingpin of the Barlow Clowes empire, stole £150m from small investors and got ten years. At the same rate as poll tax defaulters he should have got 36,000 years! Robert Maxwell and his sons stole £450m from pensioners and it is still to be seen whether anyone goes to jail.
John Barlow was unlucky; he bent the rules a little and got caught. For years the Bank of England and financial institutions knew about his activities and nothing was done. But the vast majority of the rich who make a killing from the misery of ordinary people do so perfectly legally.
They are the moneylenders and the people responsible for a society in which tens of thousands lose their homes from mortgage default each year, and millions are put on the dole.
Thirty years ago people talked about Britain as a society of 'private affluence and public squalor'. Today it is a society of super-affluence for a tiny few, and chronic despair for millions.
British capitalism is a society incapable of providing the basic necessities of life; a secure job with a living wage, somewhere to live, decent education and training, a health service that works, equality for women and freedom from racial attacks.
Even services which are available in some capitalist countries –like a functioning transport system and clean streets are a utopian dream in 1992 Britain.
London, the centre of Thatcherite 'affluence', is a living testimony to the real state of British society. Hundreds of the swanky new apartments in Docklands are empty because no one can afford them.
Huge new office blocks stand empty. At the same time, thousands of people, mainly young people, are living rough on the streets. Nothing could be a more eloquent statement about the real state of the country.
Capitalism isn't working
The long decay of capitalist Britain is now compounded by a terrible slump. Two thousand workers are losing their jobs every day. Official unemployment is at 2.6 million, but real unemployment is rocketing towards 4 million. But the real employment situation is much worse than that.
One of Thatcherism's terrible legacies is the vast increase in part-time, low-paid, insecure jobs – especially for women. This, combined with the semi-destruction of the benefits system, has created a vast army of the new poor.
Over twenty per cent of the workforce earns less than the Council of Europe decency threshold, about £9,300 a year. Single parents, pensioners, and young people unable to get a job constitute the new underclass of the impoverished.
Students are being forced into dire poverty by the attack on the grants system, and the quality of their education is fading fast. The simple necessity of finding somewhere to live, and then continuing to afford it, has become a nightmare for millions.
Irony of ironies, all this comes at a time when the 'victory' and 'success' of capitalism is being trumpeted by ruling class ideologists. People in Eastern Europe are being told every day about the wonders of Western-style capitalism. But Western capitalism isn't working, especially in Britain. That is the truth that Labour's leaders refuse to tell.
Fight for socialist policies
In this general election campaign socialists have to tell the simple truth. We need a Labour government to break the logjam represented by Major's Tories, but a Labour government will by itself solve nothing.
Workers will need to fight back under a Labour government, and the left will have to campaign for socialist policies, as well as championing every workers' struggle.
Socialists will have to fight around those policies which can lead the way to a society which answers basic human needs. Socialism is not an old discredited idea; it is an idea which has never been tried, the only one which opens the way to a radically different future.
A Programme of Action
How could a Labour government start the process of breaking the long crisis which Britain has been living through? The first thing it would need would be a programme of economic and social reconstruction.
Such a programme would have to be based on a national economic plan of investment, industrial rebuilding and infrastructure reconstruction. This would require the mobilisation of billions of pounds. Thus any Labour government intent on a break with the priorities of capitalism would have to answer this first question: where would the money come from?
There are two answers: first, it is a prerequisite of such a plan that the banks, insurance houses, building societies and all other financial institutions be nationalised. A national plan without control of capital would be unworkable. Second, there should be a punitive wealth tax on the rich.
Government spending on defence should be cut by at least 80 per cent, and a programme of reconversion of the arms industry undertaken. Money saved in defence should be redirected towards investment in industry and social welfare.
The export of capital would have to be subject to strict government controls. The billions which leave the country each year to boost the profits of the few must be brought under social control.
All the de-nationalised industries should be renationalised, together with those major firms which control the economy. Nuclear power should be phased out, and the coal industry rebuilt. The energy network, controlled by a nationalised electricity and gas industry, would have to utilise the ecologically sound techniques which are already available.
Rebuilding
What are the priorities for investment? Manufacturing industry needs vast investment to introduce modern techniques. The transport system needs a radical overhaul. Vast spending on the rail network and other forms of public transport are needed to break the ecologically damaging and socially irrational use of millions of cars.
Britain's telecommunications network is antiquated by modern standards. British Telecom should be renationalised, and Mercury nationalised, and a fibre optics national grid constructed – capable of carrying all television, broadcasting and telecommunications signals.
The country's housing stock is inadequate and crumbling. A vast programme of constructing local authority housing is needed to smash the housing crisis.
Thousands of schools and hospitals are falling to bits. Many need to be completely demolished and rebuilt.
This rebuilding sounds like an enormous scheme. But the capital already exists to do it, if it is rationally used. Millions of new jobs would be created by such a programme, including hundreds of thousands of new jobs in industry.
Living standards
The first requirement to solve the crisis of living standards is a national minimum wage at a level to ensure a decent standard of living and freedom from crippling debts.
All benefits and pensions should reach the level of the national minimum wage, and be indexed against inflation. All wages should be indexed on a sliding scale; there should be a sliding scale of hours. Work time could rapidly be reduced to 32 hours or less.
Welfare state
An ageing society needs billions poured into the NHS. The Tory health reforms need to be totally scrapped.
Education needs to be transformed, with the opening of higher and further education for all. Nursery education, available now only to the lucky few, needs to become available to all.
Private homes for the elderly should be scrapped, with a national system of free and universal care, including residential care, for senior citizens established. At one go, the enormous burdens on carers in the home, mainly women looking after elderly parents, would be broken.
A free national childcare and creche network would transform Britain at a stroke. The crippling burden on millions of women forced into part-time work, or forced to stay at home, would be destroyed. This in turn would unleash an enormous creative potential in society.
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The fight for an alternative society requires free and fighting trade unions. The first action of a Labour government should be to unshackle the unions by abolishing the anti-trade union laws.
This should go hand-in-hand with an extension of democratic rights, in the first place the introduction of proportional representation, the abolition of the House of Lords, and measures to bring the police and legal system under democratic control.
Rights of the oppressed
Capitalism's crisis hits hardest the oppressed – women, black people, lesbians and gay men, people with disabilities. A socialist government would have to immediately introduce sweeping measures to break discrimination. These include:
● equal pay for women
● positive action for women, black people and people with disabilities in education and employment
● free abortion and contraception on demand
● abolition of all immigration laws
● measures to promote training and employment for people with disabilities, and to make transport and all public buildings and open spaces accessible to them.
● outlawing of discrimination of all kinds; on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, physical or mental disability or age.
Youth
A key to the level of civilisation in any society is its ability to offer a future to young people.
Socialists must demand the right to a job, training or education at the national minimum wage to all young people. Votes should be given to youth at 16 years old. Student loans should be abolished in favour of a statutory grant at a living wage.
International
British troops have been in Ireland since 1969, fighting a useless and destructive war against Irish unity and self-determination.
There is no British solution to this war. The troops must be withdrawn and the war ended. The Prevention of Terrorism Act must be repealed
Britain should get rid of nuclear weapons and withdraw from NATO.
Scotland
Support for self-government is overwhelming in Scotland. The basis of self-determination must be the creation of a Scottish Assembly with full powers.
If it is the will of the Scottish people, then they have the right to full independence. A Welsh Assembly with its own powers must be established.
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The policies outlined here are unattainable without working class struggle to support and impose them.
A Labour government with the most radical policies would be a broken reed without a mass mobilisation of the labour movement. Addressing basic human needs means taking anti-capitalist measures; they would be resisted every inch of the way by the capitalist class and its allies.
A socialist economic programme would above all need the fight for workers' control in the factories and workplaces; workers' control means first of all working class supervision over the implementation of an economic plan.
But capitalist opposition would not be the only obstacle. At each stage the right wing and bureaucracy of the labour movement would try to sabotage socialist advance.
For this reason it is a major strategic task to fight for the renovation of the labour movement around class struggle and anti-capitalist policies. This is inconceivable without generating a tradition of united action on a class struggle basis by the left and the most militant sectors of the working class.
Breaking with capitalist policies means not just building a powerful class struggle left wing, but forging an alliance which includes the self-organisation of the oppressed as a major strategic force to defeat the right.
Where to begin?
There is a central paradox and contradiction in outlining policies which would meet the scope of the present crisis. Labour is light years away from embracing such a programme.
While anti-capitalist policies are inevitable as a solution to the depth of the crisis, large parts of even the left of the labour movement will be sceptical about the viability of a complete alternative programme, or the possibility of fighting for it.
After the election, if a Labour government is elected, the task is precisely to adopt a charter of basic demands which sum up and encapsulate an anti-capitalist approach – demands which can gain a wide echo in the labour movement and the working class.
This would have to include demands such as nuclear disarmament and the slashing of the defence budget; taxing the rich and funding health and social services; scrapping the trade union laws; an amnesty for all poll tax prisoners and defaulters; a Scottish assembly with full powers; abolition of racist immigration laws, and equal rights for women.
Such demands inevitably point in the direction of an economy which works according to a different logic to the casino madhouse of free-market capitalism. Building support for such a programme is central to renewing working class politics and the fight for socialism.