Reformist Myths and The Welfare State
Paul says,
“As the Allied powers collapsed, with significant pro-Nazi wings emerging among the ruling class in the Netherlands, France and Britain, it was clear to any working-class family with a radio that the very survival of their culture would rely on the military defeat of Germany.” (p 197)
I don't think that is true. In the 1930's, in Britain, class politics had already broken down, under the weight of reaction, and the atomisation of the working-class. In large part, that had already been achieved by the late 1920's, after the defeat of the General Strike (itself opposed by Attlee), much indeed as happened in the 1980's after the defeat of the miners in 1985. A large part of the defeat of the General Strike was down to that same Churchill that Paul now thinks workers turned to as their saviour. Large sections of the British ruling class had openly displayed their support for Mussolini in the 1920's, and for Hitler in the 1930's, including Churchill. And Churchill had shown himself prepared to use similar methods in his use of troops against miners at Tonypandy.
Even an independent Labour representation in parliament now effectively no longer existed, after the betrayal of MacDonald, and the formation of the National Government. And, as war broke out, trades union activity was outlawed, Communists were arrested, and so on. It was left to the Commonwealth Party of J.B Priestley and Tom Wintringham to keep the prospect of independent working-class representation in parliament alive. Wintringham, himself a left-communist, and Spanish Civil War veteran, had fought for the establishment of what was to become the Home Guard, and he taught many of the guerilla tactics he had learned in Spain. Yet, because of his politics, he was barred from holding any position within the organisation.
Few of the more advanced or active members of the working-class had any illusions in the nature of the British ruling-class, as far as the war was concerned. My own father, who was 20 when the war started, worked as an engineer at Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Triumph, and pretty much every other car company in the Midlands, during that period, and was moved on from each one for leading workers' grievances, before eventually getting his cards literally filled with blank ink, before he went into the army. But, when he left school in 1933, he had also gone to Dole School, along with lots of other unemployed kids. As he pointed out to me, many years later, “Don't think that everyone in Britain thought that Hitler was the main enemy. Many people saw the way he put people to work, building the roads and so on, as a good thing that the government in Britain should have been doing.” Its an important reality check, when today we see the support for Trump, and other right-wing populists and nationalists.
And, Paul says,
“After the war, those who survived the slaughter, conscious of how close organised labour had come to total obliteration, now sought a strategic accommodation.” (p 197)
But, that implies that this accommodation was not a feature of life prior to the war. That accommodation is social-democracy, and Marx had identified its basis and existence as far back as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, as well as Engels describing it in his Preface to the Condition of the Working Class.
It can be seen in the latter part of the 19th century, in the US, with the development of company welfarism, in Germany with Bismark's introduction of National Insurance, with the plans for a welfare state drawn up, in the 1920's, by Neville Chamberlain, and codified in the 1930's by the Liberal Beveridge. It's not the war that leads to the accommodation, but the very functioning of large scale socialised capital, and its need for planning and regulation, within the context of a social-democratic state.
Paul repeats the old saw that it was fear of a repetition of the revolutionary events of 1917-21 that “would force a hike in workers' living standards and a tilt in the balance of wealth distribution towards the working class.” (p 197)
But, that is clearly not true. As described earlier, company welfarism dated back to the 1880's, in the US, welfarism was a central aspect of Bismark's programme, and so on. This reflected the needs of large scale industrial capital for planning and regulation, including planning and regulation in relation to the most important element for capital, the supply of wage labour; for a different kind of labour-power; and the expansion of the market on the basis of an ever expanding range of needs. One of the problems of developing economies is that they expend a lot of social labour-time producing the commodities required for the production of the next generation of workers, i.e. feeding, clothing, sheltering, nurturing and educating children. But, with high infant mortality rates,, to view it brutally, much of that expenditure is wasted. The value put into producing this new labour-power is never reproduced, because the children do not live long enough to become suppliers of labour-power. The same thing is true where workers are constantly ill, or die young. All of these factors raise the value of labour-power, and thereby reduce the rate and mass of surplus value. As Marx sets out in Capital, the capitalists were keen from early on to encourage workers to use their wages to buy those commodities that reproduced that labour-power, and not those, like alcohol, that diminished it.
My grandmother started work on a potbank at the age of 10. But, even by that stage, as the labour process necessarily became more technological, capital had found the need to provide some basic level of education with the introduction of the 1880 Education Act. Early in the 19th century, the cooperative movement had started to provide libraries and classrooms above its premises. If workers are going to learn to read, capital would much prefer that they do so on its terms, in conditions which act to socialise them, and incorporate them, rather than being taught to read by socialists, and radicalised by learning to read from socialist texts. For the same reason, Marx argued that education in schools should only be based upon those subjects like maths and English not so open to class interpretation.
“Nothing could be introduced either in primary, or higher schools that admitted of party and class interpretation. Only, subjects such as the physical sciences, grammar, etc., were fit matter for schools. The rules of grammar, for instance, could not differ, whether explained by a religious Tory or a free thinker. Subjects that admitted of different conclusions must be excluded and left for the adults to such teachers as Mrs. Law, who gave instruction in religion.”
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| Regimented production units on a Fordist, production line in a State Capitalist Education Factory. |
Moreover, as can be seen with the very high savings rates, in China, where workers have to cover themselves against possible sickness and so on, this is very wasteful. Every worker must assume the worst possible, rather than the average, set of conditions. Each worker thereby over-saves, taking demand out of the economy, whilst tending to increase the value of labour-power. Capital has an incentive to establish welfare systems, and National Insurance schemes, because it thereby reduces this over-saving, and reduces the value of labour-power. It means that education and healthcare can be supplied on a mass production, Fordist basis, under its control, and also thereby provide the social-democratic state with huge economic levers to plan and regulate economic activity at a macro-economic level, in the interests of capital.
And, its simply not true that, in the aftermath of war these social-democratic states made a shift of resources to workers to buy off the potential of revolutionary uprisings. In much of Europe, devastated by war, workers suffered terrible deprivation, in the post-war years. The USSR kept a lid on workers in the Eastern Bloc, but equally, Allied armies kept a lid on workers in West Germany, Italy, Greece, Japan and so on, whilst in Spain and Portugal, workers were still under the heel of fascist regimes. The allies had been intent on ensuring that it was DeGaulle who exercised power in France, suppressing the communists, who had been the backbone of the resistance.
In Britain, rationing continued into the 1950's, and was ended by the Tories, not Labour. Attlee, not only diverted scarce resources away from workers and into the development of nuclear weapons, as well as into the huge waste of the Korean War, and Britain's continued adventures across the globe, in Africa, Aden, Cyprus and so on, but also sent out troops to break workers strikes.
The reason for the expansion of the welfare state was not fear of revolution, but that it was in the interests of large-scale, socialised capital; the reason it was able to expand so rapidly, and that workers living standards rose during the 1950's, was that the post-war, long wave boom saw a large rise in productivity, as all of those new technologies that began to be introduced in the 1930's, were rolled out extensively, and whole new ranges of commodities, based upon those technologies began to be sold, at prices that workers could now afford. It was not fear of revolution that led to the welfare state, but the needs of large-scale capital, it was not fear of revolution that led to rising wages but the normal functioning of the long wave, as the expansion of capital led to a rise in the demand for labour-power, as had happened in every previous cycle, as unemployment fell, and wages rose.
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