A Plea for the Human Race

Well we have taken the first steps into 1967 and by now most people have probably forgotten the good wishes and the resolutions with which they welcomed another new year and have settled down to the same old grind.

Nineteen sixty six, let us remember, was supposed to be “make or break” year. So far, the Labour government have not committed themselves on whether we made or broke; like most of their instant propaganda slogans, “make or break” is something they are trying to forget. In its place, they are assuring us that 1967 will definitely be the year (just as 1966 was going to be) when the British balance of payments comes into balance.

Workers who think that the international finances of the British capitalist class have some effect on their lives will be impressed by Labour’s assertion that in 1967 they will also crack the Rhodesian crisis, take a big step towards joining the Common Market and solve many of the social problems, like destitution and poor housing, at home. Workers who think like that will be impressed by anything.

They were probably deeply impressed, for example, by an interview the Prime Minister gave to James Margach. the Sunday Times political correspondent, which was published on New Year’s Day. Wilson first said, in effect, that his government had got away with an unprecedented confidence trick on the working class:

Not many people in July would have said that we could have got to the end of the first six months of total restraint with the high degree of success we have achieved . . . the wages policy for the first six months has been carried through without a single strike on a wages claim . . .

 

There is no need to add anything to this; it is adequate enough comment on the docility of the majority of the trade unions in the year of Labour government grace of 1966. But more follows. Wilson went on to say what effect he thought his government’s policies had had:

. . .  the cutting out of waste —- wasteful expenditure, waste in the boardroom and a growing awareness of the need to cut out waste in the use of labour.

 

It is clear that Wilson hopes 1967 will see more of what he calls the “shake out and application of economic methods to management”. This may be fine for shareholders and for politicians but not so fine for those who are shaken out and who have the economic methods of management applied to them.

What this means in direct terms is that thousands — perhaps millions — of people will be out of work, will have to take jobs at lower pay, or grab one of the few places at a government training centre on a miserly grant in the hope of finding another job when they finish their course. Or perhaps it means tearing up a family’s roots and moving them and all they have to a place where another job may be found.

It need surprise nobody that this is happening under a Labour government, who somewhere in their history have had supporters who hoped to build a world free of unemployment and who thought only Tory mine owners could properly be concerned with economic management. Labour is now a fully fledged party of capitalism, standing proudly and openly for capitalism modern, automated, shaken out, economically managed.

Why, it may be asked, the hurry? An unavoidable feature of capitalism is that goods and services are produced for sale. The profits which are realised when goods are sold go to the people who provide the capital – the investors, who invest their money precisely because they hope to get a profit. If the investors think their profit is in doubt they will usually withdraw their capital, very often in a rush. The Labour government have spent some time assuring the investors that they have no objection to profits and to make the point even clearer they have indulged in the customary juggling with taxation relief and allowances to provide what they hope will be the only incentives investors appreciate to sink their money in certain industries and areas.

But if the investors are concerned about selling their goods at a profit, it follows that they must be concerned about two other aspects of this — the price the goods can be sold at and the cost of their production. When the market is easy and the demand is high prices are high also and there is consequently little need to worry overmuch about the costs of production. When the opposite is happening — when the market is depressed, as it is in many fields at the moment — there is a severe pressure upon production costs and the employers are continually looking for ways of reducing them.

Here Labour’s doctrine of economic management, and of cost effectiveness, comes into its own. Cost effectiveness means hard bargaining at every stage in buying whatever is needed for production. It means haggling with the suppliers of every nut and bolt, every envelope, every elastic band. It means pricing everything down to three decimal places of a penny. It also means hard bargaining with the unions over the cost of that most vital part of the productive process — labour power.

This is where the wage freeze comes in, as Labour’s help in backing up the employers in their making a stand, at this time of troubles for British capitalism, over wages. It is Labour’s encouragement to the employers, to be cost conscious over wages as over everything else.

There is no end of this in sight. In 1967 the freeze, under whatever name, will continue and so will Labour’s policy of making British industry grudge every penny it spends on production. There will, as part of this drive, be more schemes of merging companies to bring about economies in production and to cut out duplicated research and administration. A by-product of these mergers will be the forming of larger and more powerful opponents for the unions to face. Labour have already successfully carried through their merger policy in the aircraft industry and their Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, under their new convert Sir Frank Kearton, is only just getting into its stride. When it does, it will give something to think about to those old Labour men who thought their party was opposed to cartels and monopolies which to them stood for capitalism impersonal and ruthless.