Socialism and the Welfare State
Cole, G. D. H.
The following article is a condensed version of a pamphlet entitled Is This Socialism? recently published in England and written by G. D. H. Cole. Though clearly intended as part of the...
...True, they have nationalized a number of industries and services...
...b) statutory allocation of a share in profits to a capital fund which would become at once public property and, if invested in the business, would carry shareholding rights to be exercised by public nominees...
...I regard it as a great calamity that Labor Governments have allowed themselves to fall into the evil habit of conferring titles both on persons who are barely distinguishable from those ennobled by their political opponents and—worse still—on persons who are supposed to share with them in the socialist faith...
...In part, then, the absence of a more socialist program is to be attributed to t1 e Labor Party's wish to get back to power—or at least to office...
...Is our goal 322 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 the classless society, or only the so-called "open" society which is in fact still closed to a majority of the people...
...Certainly some Labor Party leaders, notably Herbert Morrison, have made no bones about saying that what is needed now is a pause for consolidating what has been set on foot rather than a venture into new projects...
...In effect, it sanctioned degrees of inequality of earned incomes which would have horrified the socialist pioneers...
...Nor is there at present any sign of a wish on their part to dissociate themselves as a group from the groups lower down in the economic hierarchy...
...Of course it would be necessary for the directors whom the Government would appoint to such businesses, not only to play an active part in their operation in the public interest, but also to work together, through some sort of collective body including all the state directors within an industry, and to follow a collective policy laid down by the Government's planning agencies...
...But, in practice, lines are drawn, however arbitrarily, for tax purposes...
...Therefore, the sooner we begin on this essential task of education and propaganda, the less long shall we have to wait for its results...
...I am not suggesting that, in most industries, average output has fallen...
...It is fully consistent with Socialist principles to allow what ever differentials turn out to be needed to procure adequate recruitment for the more skilled kinds of work, and also to offer whatever piecework or similar incentives turn out to be necessary in order to secure high output...
...Thirdly—and here we come nearest of all to the bone—the experience of one kind of totalitarian rule under Hitler and of another kind of totalitarianism under Stalin unavoidably put into the minds of reasonable persons a fear of placing too much power into the State's hands, even if the State professed to be socialist...
...I feel sure that it is not...
...What we are getting in practice appears to be a society in which the field of recruitment for the superior positions is being considerably widened, so as to give those who can get as far as the higher ranges of grammar or technical education an improved chance of rising further even if their parents cannot afford to help them...
...but most of those which are of general interest appear below...
...So, no doubt, it was...
...The workers as a class cannot properly be invited to collaborate on any terms which envisage an indefinite continuance of the toll levied on their labor by profit-making employers or shareholders, or the continued private appropriation of that part of their product which is needed to finance new investment...
...but I feel no doubt that the supply of good second-raters can be, and that more good second-raters are what we chiefly need to do the jobs which the advance towards a fair deal for everybody will require us to fill...
...There is no doubt that most people in Great Britain do prefer parliamentary government, and the socialist who wishes to see his ideas carried out has to proceed on that assumption...
...They have now, thanks to the enterprise of the Labor Government between 1945 and 1950, got nearly as far as they can go along these lines, until they set about doing two other things as well—smashing the class-system by a direct attack on property rights, and putting real responsibility into the hands of ordinary people...
...This could be done by (a) statutory limitation of dividends—that is, of the part of profits that can be paid out to shareholders as incomes...
...But there is also a tendency for a new grade, or even class, of highly paid superskilled manual workers to develop and to increase its distance from the main body...
...By rapid stages private ownership of joint stock enterprises would be extinguished: they would become public property, and the State would be free to make what arrangements it might think best for their future conduct...
...The State would become, to an ever-increasing extent, part proprietor of a host of productive businesses, and the holder of mortgage charges on many estates and non-company businesses remaining in private hands...
...What does all this indicate in respect of the class-structure of the society towards which we have been moving...
...It would be necessary to train men specially for these tasks, in order to ensure well-informed intervention in the affairs of the businesses concerned...
...I do not agree with this view, partly because I do not believe there is any satisfactory halting place between a mainly capitalist and a mainly socialist economy, but also because I am afraid that the effect of what has been done, if we halt at the point we hau'e reached, will be to establish a new class-system rather than to clear the road for a further advance towards a classless society...
...For what we have been doing is not to put people on an equal footing, but only to lessen the extremes of inequality by redistributing grossly unequal incomes through taxation...
...Full employment has been chiefly responsible for the great changes that have come about in factory relations and in industrial discipline as a whole...
...If the end is no longer socialism, but something else—what else...
...The electors who returned the Labor Government of 1945 voted, for the most part, not for socialism but for a change—and not too great a change...
...If this is a correct picture, the question that arises is whether a society of this sort is on the road to socialism...
...for such cases there is no valid way of deciding how much of his "profit" comes from his invested capital and how much from his work...
...First—to take one which lies quite near the surface—nationalization, in the form of public management of industries and services, does not look quite so enticing as it did now that we have had some of it and can see how it works out in our society as it is...
...Socially, too, there are powerful arguments against collaboration, because it is liable not only to destroy the fighting spirit of the trade unions but also to break up class-solidarity and put in its place a loyalty to the particular firm which unscrupulous employers can use as a means of undermining trade-union influence...
...In Great Britain, this fear of putting too much power into the State's hands has hardly come, as yet, to be more than an uneasiness...
...It began to be seen that the government of an industry by a National Board could not be simply identified with its government by "the people," and that there was a real problem of finding out how to control the controllers...
...This is partly to the good, where it prevents slave-driving or feverish self-driving under the influence of fear...
...They might easily have done the same in Russia had not the Bolsheviks first stamped hard on the kulaks and then collectivized the villages...
...Social ownership is only half the battle: the other half is real participation by the workers in control—not only at the top, but at every level from the work-group upwards...
...This latter belief is shared by their active supporters, and makes them also eager to win...
...It has always been one of the essential socialist objectives to put an end to poverty and to ensure that in the distribution of incomes the children, the aged and the incapacitated are not pushed aside by the predatory or the strong...
...Given a clearly defined socialist program of this sort, I do not see why the workers should not be prepared to collaborate with the dying capitalist under the control of a Socialist Government pledged to carry it through to the end...
...If it is still socialism, let us tell the electors frankly how we propose to advance towards it...
...but their main attack was concentrated on the inequality due to ownership...
...Socialists saw the gross inequalities of income as proceeding much more from the "rights of property" than from differential rewards in return for unequal services...
...On that ground, in Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 315 the main, they demanded the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the elimination of the toll levied by individuals on the social product on the score of ownership...
...Riches and aristocracy still go together in the case of a limited group of old families which have large holdings of urban or industrial land or have used the accumulations of the past from land to become great investors in business...
...but beyond the permitted sums generally applicable, the capital should pass to the public, subject to such transitional charges as might be allowed...
...The following article is a condensed version of a pamphlet entitled Is This Socialism...
...Our society has become a good deal more "open" than it used to be, in the sense that the old distinction between "gentlemen" and "not-gentlemen" has largely broken down...
...Certainly not that we are advancing towards a "classless society...
...whether or no, it is not very easy to look forward to their extension to cover most branches of production, nor -is it easy to see what alternative socialists have to offer...
...In large enterprises I do not think this can be done as long as they continue to be conducted for private profit: in small ones it sometimes can, where the human relations are good...
...I think it is clearly incompatible with any social system that allows great fortunes, or even moderate fortunes that have been inherited once, to be transmitted at death...
...But, as we advance further towards a socialist society, the planning of wages will become indispensable, if only because wages and prices are inevitably linked together and it will be as a rule a matter of choosing between higher wages and higher prices, with the balance of advantage shifting in favor of lower prices as the toll levied by unproductive consumers is reduced by the erosion of incomes derived from ownership...
...So far, so good...
...Psychologically, any such notion encounters very strong resistance, both rational and irrational...
...Nowadays, these fears have become much less potent, though they still exist...
...G. D. H. Cole A socialist, we used to be told, is "one who has yearnings for the equal division of unequal earnings...
...Industrial democracy is therefore an indispensable part of social democracy—that is, of socialism...
...The question is whether it does not, as a hard matter of fact, offer the prospect of even greater resistance to socialism than the society it has displaced...
...The supply of new recruits for the non-manual occupations which have declined in relative earning capacity is for the most part less likely to be affected because our educational system has a strong bias in favor of such occupations and because some of them are more attractive in themselves, and may still carry higher prestige than better-paid manual jobs...
...In our society, the opening of higher education to wider class groups (but by no means to all, regardless of class), combined with full employment and greater social security, may well be creating barriers in the way of socialism rather than helping its advance, especially if a child's whole chance of rising to the higher social and economic levels is to depend on the results of a single test, applied at an age when the nature of the home environment is bound to be of great influence in determining these results...
...For the same reason I do not expect a majority even of the active leaders of the Labor Party to agree...
...But beyond these reasonable limits I think socialists are bound to stand for doing away with inheritance, because they cannot recognize any able-bodied person's right to live in idleness on the labor of others or to claim on account of inherited wealth a much bigger income than he can earn by his own exertions...
...To these must be added the aristocracy of banking and commerce which has bought or married its way into the "upper classes" in the traditional sense of the term...
...It took a considerable time and a great deal of apparently fruitless effort to get the working-class movement solidly behind the program which the Labor Government carried through between 1945 and 1950...
...I cannot conceive how any socialist can defend this kind of social snobbery, which does immense harm to the socialist cause by compromising the Labor Party with the unclean thing and spreading cynicism about the sincerity and disinterestedness of those who lead it...
...recently published in England and written by G. D. H. Cole...
...This description neatly slurred over the fact that the inequalities the socialists were most intent on getting rid of did not arise out of earnings at all, but out of the possession of claims to income based on ownership and, above all, on inherited wealth...
...But they have considerably changed their composition...
...They argue, for example, that the increased numbers in higher education have already involved a fall in average quality...
...But in this case too the children of the unskilled workers are largely left out...
...I do not expect a majority of the electorate to agree at present with what I have said, for the simple reason that it differs from what they have been used to hearing...
...and I see every reason why it should remain possible for security of tenure, subject to good use and payment of rent, to be granted to the families of farmers or householders from one generation to the next...
...And why was it that the Labor Government made no attempt, or almost none, to attack inequalities of ownership, and contented itself with lopping off by taxation a large fraction of the really big incomes, while leaving the property that gave rise to most of them practically intact...
...But we cannot quite avoid asking ourselves whether our present immunity in this respect may not have something to do with the fact that what we have been engaged in setting up has been, not socialism, but only a partial embodiment, within our limited opportunities, of the Welfare State...
...We are in danger of failing to carry through the major reorganization and large investment program which many of our industries need because capitalist insistence on profit-taking, which provokes workers' insistence on higher wages, does not leave enough resources for capital development or make it possible to guide investment into the right channels...
...But side by side with these, and as rich or richer, are those who have made great fortunes in business too recently to be counted among the "idle rich...
...Cole and his publisher, The New Statesman and Nation, for permission to reprint...
...It would be premature today, while non-wage incomes remain uncontrolled and while the greater part of industry is still under capitalist operation for profit, to introduce any "national wages policy" under which a body of highly placed officials would have the right to fix wages as they might think fit...
...This, I agree, makes it much more difficult than it would be if continued office could be assured to persuade the workers to modify their traditional attitudes: indeed, they cannot fairly be asked to modify them in any way that would reduce their ability to resume their fighting posture in face of any attempt by a Conservative Government to undo the achievements of its predecessor...
...It is not so easy as it was to contemplate with ecstasy, or even with equanimity, the prospect of all or most of the means of production, etc., being nationalized, if that is to mean their administration by a series of Public Boards on the model of the Coal Board, the Transport Commission, and the B.E.A...
...It is linked on the one hand to the major professions and on the other to the group of middling profit-makers and industrial executives...
...But for most of them the particular wants are much more clearly present, and much more of a driving force, than the vaguer ideals they entertain...
...The restriction of inheritance would of itself do nothing to lessen inequalities of earned income, though it would do a good deal towards leveling those who receive large incomes partly from work as managers or members of the higher professions and partly from ownership of property...
...We are in danger of coming to regard large salaries, titles for trade union and cooperative leaders, and the control of industry and the workers by highly paid administrators imposed from above, not as necessary evils of transition, but as right and proper elements in the new society we are attempting to create...
...These are not Stakhanovites...
...There remains, however, the obvious difficulty that under our political system no Government can be sure of remaining in office for more than five years, and that accordingly the carrying-out of the program might be broken off short by the return of the Conservatives to power after an election victory...
...Accordingly, if a moderate program offers the best prospect of electoral victory, the odds are very heavily in favor of the party, as well as the politicians, preferring it to anything more drastic...
...In practice, however, Socialists—as exemplified by the Labor Government of 1945—have attacked inequalities of income much more than inequalities of property, and earned incomes almost, though not quite, as much as unearned...
...but that cannot alter the fact that the consequence was to undermine the old belief in a much nearer approach to economic equality, and to make it very much more difficult to launch any attack on middleclass, or even upper middle-class, incomes in general...
...This applies even to the nationalized industries, in which the controlling boards are far too remote from the actual workers to give them any sense of participation—and would remain so even if the trade unions were allowed to appoint members to sit on them in a formally representative capacity...
...Largely, no doubt, because it did not believe that a majority of the electors would be prepared to give it a mandate to do anything of the kind...
...The alternative is to rest content with what has been achieved, and to give up trying to establish a socialist society...
...Though clearly intended as part of the discussion preceding the Labor Party conference this fall, the pamphlet raises many questions of larger scope and interest, including a number that have been discussed in previous issues of DISSENT...
...In some industries, including those which have been nationalized, there have been considerable developments of joint consultation in the workplaces as well as at higher levels...
...I COME NOW TO THE MAJOR PROBLEM of industrial democracy...
...on the contrary, it has been going up despite a small reduction in average hours of work...
...Nationalization, or rather socialization, would thus advance by a new route, even if no further industries were taken over by the methods hitherto adopted...
...Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 329 The effect of these changes would be to throw upon the workers responsibilities which they would exercise, not jointly with nominees of their employers, but by themselves, under arrangements negotiated by their trade unions with the employers and their associations...
...It also thought there were good reasons for not paying those of its own supporters whom it appointed to such positions less than it paid to persons taken over from capitalist industry...
...In other words, is the Welfare State, in the form in which it has been developed so far, a step on the road to socialism, or a step in quite different direction—that is, a step, not towards a classless society, but rather towards a new stratification that is likely to persist and to become more marked...
...but it would be under no necessity to set up huge organizations except where the technical conditions required them...
...Why was this...
...That, however, only involves re-casting the question...
...This means that any collaboration that can be advocated under present conditions must be carefully safeguarded so as to preserve, and where possible to increase, trade union power...
...Under conditions of universal suffrage, electorates do not vote for revolutions—unless the revolutions have already happened...
...Most people are neither socialists nor anti-socialists in the sense of having a thought-out view of the social and economic system they want...
...Since Mr...
...a much lower proportion of top Civil Servants and of the successful members of the higher professions come from a small group of gentlemen's schools...
...Secondly—to go a good deal deeper—equality, or even near-equality, does not look quite so simply desirable an objective as it used to do...
...By participation I do not mean merely consultation: I mean real control...
...for it is not what they have become used to saying...
...But the increases have been due mainly, if not entirely, to greater mechanization and improved working arrangements rather than to higher effort or better cooperation...
...and I can see the positive advantage that it would not involve the creation of more top-heavy centralized administrations of the type of the Coal Board and the Transport Commission...
...There will have to be both some general way of determining how large an aggregate of wage-payments the economy is able to afford, and, broadly, how what is deemed to be available shall be divided among the various claimants...
...But at the same time we are putting an increasingly difficult barrier between those who do get so far and those who do not...
...I have written this pamphlet in the belief that since 1950 Labor's official leadership has shown clear signs of not knowing how to make a further advance towards socialism and perhaps even of not much wanting to...
...As for peerages, surely the correct course is to abolish the House of Lords at the earliest possible moment, and in the meantime to make do with those who have been ennobled already to assist in winding up its affairs...
...To be sure, this difficulty applies to every attempt to advance towards socialism by non-revolutionary means: it is part of the price we Pay for preferring parliamentary government to dictatorship under a one-party system...
...More widespread for the present is the economic assimilation between the large body of fairly-skilled, but not super-skilled, manual workers and the main body of white-collar workers: so that these too are being merged economically and to a considerable extent socially as well into a single stratum...
...Such a society as this is definitely not socialist...
...Such taxation of inheritance would, of course, mean that the State would have to be prepared to take over the actual property of those dying with considerable fortunes and not money payments supposed to represent their value...
...The situation outlined in the preceding paragraph is of course only a new version of a very old dilemma...
...and this group of new wealth, including now many high-level business administrators who draw large salaries and have risen by personal exertion from the middle or lower grades, forms a larger proportion than ever before of those who can afford to live at a luxury level and to hobnob, without much feeling of inferiority, with their American opposite numbers...
...As against this, they have taken over a structure of taxes on incomes erected to meet the emergency of war and have used it to help finance an expansion of social services in time of peace with very little discrimination between incomes derived from property and incomes received as a return for personal services...
...Let us try to drag some of them into daylight...
...It will take a great deal of effort to get similar support for a new program that will carry us on towards socialism...
...The workings of, universal suffrage under totalitarian conditions did not encourage the continuance of the faith that, where the "people" had the right to vote—all nominally on equal terms and with the secrecy of the ballot guaranteed—democratic government would necessarily follow as a result...
...But the Welfare State is, all the same, not socialism: in the form in which we have been attempting to move towards it in recent years it is at most only socialistic— if even that...
...The outcome would be a highly varied and flexible system of 328 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 socialized ownership and control, which would not preclude leaving as many small enterprises as might be considered desirable to continue under private ownership and control, subject to due provisions to ;insure good working - conditions and compliance with planning requirements...
...Why should I work harder, or produce more," Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 327 says the socialist workman, "in order to swell my capitalist employers' profits...
...They depend, however, at least as much on full employment as on the expansion of the social services, and are precarious to the extent to which there is a danger of severe unemployment coming back...
...This is part of the answer...
...To win an election without a policy is the surest way of losing the next, and of spreading dismay and disillu sionment among one's supporters...
...and I cannot feel that it is even on the way to becoming socialist...
...But I can see no valid objection to this, if it is merely a stage in the process of acquiring total, or majority, ownership of the businesses in question...
...and account has to be taken of this in estimating the effects of educational development on the class structure...
...I, cannot help saying that it fills me with sheer disgust to see Labor leaders accepting titles for no conceivable purpose except that of denying their alleged faith in social equality—I mean those who become "Sirs," or join the peerage without being specially needed to represent the Government in the Upper Chamber...
...Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 331...
...THE FIRST QUESTION THAT ARISES HERE IS that of the extent to which Socialism is to be regarded as compatible with economic inequality in its various forms...
...They did not for the most part think of it at all largely in terms of nationalization of industries— much less of socialization of property—though they were quite prepared to see some industries that had got into a mess taken into public ownership...
...To the extent of our success in advancing towards this we have been doing what every socialist must wish to do...
...It did not, because it did not really want to: in the main, it concerned itself rather with finding the money to pay for the social services and for other public outgoings in the easiest way, rather than with attacking unearned incomes as such...
...and even this redistribution has Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 319 quite largely taken the form of making the poor pay for one another's basic needs...
...They denied the contention of many orthodox economists that differences in earned incomes corresponded to real differences in the value of services rendered, and were dictated by inexorable economic laws...
...I am a socialist and a believer that socialism means, above all else, a classless society...
...The transfer of functions to the workers, far from undermining their collective power, would add to it, and would provide the foundation for extending their authority into further fields...
...Why, we are impelled to ask, did the Labor Party, when it put forward a program for further advances, beyond what it had received a mandate to do in 1945, produce in succession three further programs in which there was still virtually no attempt to attack inequality at its roots or to advance beyond mere piecemeal nationaliza 316 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 tions to the socialization without which it was clearly impossible to set about the establishment of a classless society...
...A "player" can not only captain England, or his country, at cricket: he can also captain the Nuffield Organization of Unilever—or, of course, the B.E.A...
...In the main, excessive disparities of earned incomes would have to be tackled by other methods...
...but it is also to the bad, where it conduces to irresponsibility or to a refusal to cooperate in team work...
...I am not in the least interested in helping the Labor Party to win a majority in Parliament unless it means to use its majority for advancing as fast as is practicable towards such a society...
...Class-structure is a matter, not only of incomes, but also of culture and of social prestige...
...The transition could, if it were thought fit, be eased by allowing limited additional annuities to be paid for a single further life...
...Most of them did, no doubt, hold that the large disparities of earned incomes were due to a considerable extent to the existence of large unearned incomes, and that, if the latter were eliminated, it would become much easier to narrow differences in earned incomes...
...This reacted on, and interacted with, the new look of nationalized enterprise...
...We may, or may not, approve of these bodies...
...Obedience was enforced partly by custom, partly by inducements such as higher earnings for greater efforts, and partly—and to no small extent—by fear of the sack or of being "laid off" for offending the 326 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 authorities, or in extreme cases of being blacklisted as well as fired...
...They need to be assured that the toll levied on labor by the claims of ownership will be brought to an end as speedily as possible and that immediately a beginning will be made with the transfer of profits needed for investment to public ownership...
...Why then, did it not want to do what its professed socialist faith surely required of it...
...Under this second head I have in mind the replacement of foremen by elected supervisors chosen by the workers themselves from among properly qualified candidates and the substitution, in suitable cases, of collective contracts under which groups of workers will undertake to carry through a particular job, or series of jobs, at a collective price, making their own arrangements for the organization of the work and sharing the proceeds in accordance with rules drawn up by the trade unions to which they belong...
...No doubt, it would be nice to double our supply of first-raters...
...Some people say that a more equal society is impossible, or will lead to disaster, because there are too few able persons to run it...
...It would therefore mean that the Government would be continually acquiring ownership both of shares and bonds of all sorts and of other forms of property, such as houses, landed estates, and private businesses...
...They are very often not openly ad mitted, but haunt the backs of people's minds and are half-repressed...
...A step above them socially, and sometimes but not always economically, the lesser professional groups and the general run of technicians 320 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 constitute, together with the middling tradesmen, an intermediate stratum —a petite bourgeoisie which, far from dying out, is more than holding its own in relative numbers...
...Quite serious and even cogent reasons can be advanced in support of this doubt...
...Accordingly I believe that not merely higher death duties but positive abolition of the right of inheritance beyond fairly modest limits should take a high place among Labor's next steps toward its declared socialist objective...
...Of course socialism involves the Welfare State: that is implied in the old slogan "From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs...
...With it go a large part of the farmers and many small employers, such as garage keepers, jobbing builders, radio dealers and electrical contractors: so that this stratum includes groups of widely divergent fortunes and interests...
...THERE WILL, I AM SURE, BE MANY OBJECTORS to the new pro 330 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 gram outlined here...
...If, in 1950 or in 1954, the Labor Party had put forward a really challenging election program, involving a large advance in the direction of socialism, one thing certain would have been, and would be, the loss of the ensuing General Election by the defection of the "marginal" voters...
...We are in danger of accepting "reasonable" profits and the maintenance of capitalist operation as legitimate for the major part of industry, provided only that the Government holds certain very broad powers of planning and control— powers which, under such a system, it is very difficult to use effectively in any matter upon which the capitalists are not prepared to "play ball...
...but a limited number can go a long way if they have good seconds-in-command at call...
...For a time, it would find itself the partner Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 323 of profit-making business men, and engaging in profit-making enterprises...
...and on the boards of directors of the great business concerns there are to be found a large number of "self-made" men who have risen, if not from the ranks, at all events from quite low beginnings...
...I see no reason why it should be regarded as inadmissible for a person to pass on to his wife or children, or perhaps to other near relatives, moderate sums which he has accumulated by saving in his own lifetime, or of course to transmit in moderation personal possessions which are not of a capital kind...
...To them I answer that I do not care if it is—for the time being...
...It could amalgamate businesses into larger concerns where this seemed likely to increase efficiency...
...They held, as against this view, that the high salaries and fees paid to professional and managerial workers were in part a reflection of the social inequality inherent in a social system which accepted unearned incomes based on property as legitimate and as carrying high prestige, and were in part due to the near-monopoly of higher education by the children of the well-to-do...
...The foreman can no longer play the tyrant as easily as he could in the past...
...They wished to diminish the inequalities of earned as well as of unearned income...
...Exceptionally, a few managers or employers do contrive, by virtue of sheer personality, to establish really friendly and cooperative relationships...
...BUT IS THIS THE WHOLE EXPLANATION...
...They have certain wants, for particular things, and certain broad preferences for one sort of society over another...
...In the case of peerages, this practice is defended on the ground that, as long as the House of Lords exists as a legislative chamber, Labor has to be represented in it...
...and, in doing that, we soon find ourselves a long way off the old formula of socialization—or even nationalization—of "the means of production, distribution and ex change...
...It did this the more easily and with fewer doubts because there was proceeding at the same time so considerable an uplifting of standards at the bottom of the social scale and because so many workers in positions of superior vantage had actually become able to earn good middle-class incomes that it seemed natural for those who were 318 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 higher in the scale of incomes earned by honest work to move up too...
...It could use the powers it would thus acquire to appoint its own directors to joint stock enterprises and to foreclose on concerns which failed to meet their obligations...
...So we fall to disputing about how much of industry we still need to nationalize after all, in order to infuse enough socialism—if it is socialism—into the economic system...
...Oxford and Cambridge are no longer gentlemen's preserves to anything like the same extent as they used to be...
...This I believe to be entirely practicable, provided that the policy receives the full backing of a sympathetic Labor Government—but not otherwise...
...As for the middle incomes, no special action seems to be called for, except a steady policy of reducing trading margins so as to squeeze out the inefficient as fast as they can be replaced by more efficient producing or trading firms—which should become fully practicable if the level of new investment is made high enough to keep pace with technical progress . Wage-incomes and the lower ranges of salary-incomes raise more com plex problems...
...As far as they envisaged anything clearly, they thought of the change they wanted mainly in terms of better social services, including more equal educational opportunities, and of "full employment" as against a return to the depressed conditions of the 1930s...
...It could, for example, sell or lease some of them to the Consumers Cooperative Movement, convert others into Producers Cooperative societies, and arrange for others to continue as publicly owned joint-stock companies...
...for many of them are timeworkers or setters-up rather than operators of machines, and even where they are piece-workers their exploits are not announced in the newspapers or rewarded with public decorations...
...and trade-union bargaining has spread to many trades in which it was previously almost nonexistent...
...Admittedly, it is often difficult, or even impossible, to draw a clear line between earned and unearned incomes where a person gives his services to a business in which his property, or some of it, is also invested...
...The Labor Government thought it saw good reasons for paying the administrators and managers it needed for the nationalized enterprises as good salaries as they would have got under private ownership, or as those holding analogous positions in capitalist industry were continuing to get...
...Side by side with this gradual transfer, the State could begin at once to assume public ownership of that part of profits—or of a part of the part—that is needed for new investment...
...Cole focuses exclusively on domestic policy, some sections of the pamphlet involve problems local to English politics...
...and, in a society such as ours, with its long traditions of gradual adaptation as against revolution, most voters vote on the assumption that the Government they vote for will do lese...
...The consequence is a relaxation of discipline which is bound, for the time being, to react adversely on output...
...Given full employment, trade unions are in a powerful bargaining position, because employers cannot afford to lose the services of even moderately efficient workers...
...The greatest change of all, however, has been in the lessened prestige of those who give the orders and the sense of increased power to question them among those to whom they are given...
...For it would create a situation in which there would be far too few buyers for the estates passing at death to be sold to new private owners...
...It therefore, on what appeared to be valid grounds, created a new labor aristocracy of officials in the public service, and in doing so had at any rate some influence in causing such bodies as trade unions to increase the salaries of officials who were not so transferred...
...In a socialist society, it 324 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 will clearly not be possible to continue to allow wage-rates to be settled by a large number of uncoordinated bargains, influenced largely by the degree of shelter or exposure of particular industries to outside competition, or to the expansion or contraction in the demand for their products...
...Such arrangements could, and should, operate both in nationalized industries and in those remaining in private ownership or in transition from private to public ownership...
...Piecework incentives and other monetary inducements still retain their power, but have been to some extent weakened by the introduction of guaranteed minimum wages and by the diminished danger of getting fired for not producing enough...
...Some who regard themselves as socialists will object to it on the ground that it is bad electioneering...
...Democracy came to be thought of less exclusively in terms of electoral rights and more in terms of personal freedom—of speech and writing and association—and with this went a greater preparedness to take account of the claims of minorities and of groups within the larger society...
...If we mean to constitute a really democratic society, permeated by the spirit of social equality, we shall have to find ways of replacing the old incentives of fear and habit with new inducements more consistent with the recognition of equal human rights...
...That, I fear, is what many who continue to call themselves socialists are really minded to do, shelter ing their apostasy behind the assertion that the majority of the electors would not be induced to vote for it...
...Except at the very bottom of the scale—the numbers in which have been reduced—there has been a diminution of economic and social inequality between skilled and less skilled manual workers, and between manual and white-collar workers...
...and the higher management has to mind its P's and Q's when trade union susceptibilities are in question...
...A part of it has been losing, and a part gaining ground: it has no common social outlook or political allegiance, though the greater proportion tends to be politically Conservative, with some tendency to swing over when things go badly wrong...
...In the past, in a society explicitly based on inequality, it was for the , workers to obey orders and for the representatives of their "masters" to give them...
...but neither trade union bargaining nor joint consultation makes the worker a responsible partner in industry, or necessarily gives the individual a sense that it is up to him to render of his best and to think of himself as a member of a team cooperating in the performance of an essentially social task...
...THE GAINS ACHIEVED THROUGH FULL EMPLOYMENT and the Welfare State are beyond doubt considerable in terms of the reduction in the amount of sheer suffering and enfeeblement of human quality by privation...
...Nobody, however, can believe that the existing wage-structure complies with these requirements, or is anything other than a confusion due partly to the varying fortunes of the tug-of-war between employers and trade unions and partly to sheer accident or tradition...
...and it would have been possible to discriminate further against unearned incomes if the Labor Government had really wished to do so...
...Above all these strata the rich remain...
...but they have compensated the owners, if not with generosity, at any rate so as to leave them with their claims to income broadly intact...
...This is necessary, not only for the sake of its effects in making the workers more conscious of their responsibility for high productivity, on which the standard of living must depend, but also because it is impossible to have a really democratic society if most of the members have to spend most of their lives at work under essentially undemocratic conditions...
...In short, is it towards socialism we are tending, or towards an Anglicized version of the American conception of democracy...
...than it says it intends to do, even if its declared intentions are not very extensive...
...It is, of course, much less aristocratic than the society it is displacing: in terms of social origins the top classes of today are a very mixed lot...
...So far, they are a great good...
...Nor should there be any need in business occupations to pay the very large salaries which are based largely on a comparison with what is received by capitalist employers in the form of profit...
...It did not, because it did not want to—at any rate for the time being...
...In France the peasants, when they had got the land and destroyed the old feudal privileges, turned promptly into a conservative class and became a bulwark against socialism...
...What it involves is, first, that the trade unions shall set out deliberately to extend the area of collective bargaining to include much that employers still regard as belonging to the sphere of "managerial functions" and therefore outside trade union competence, and secondly that they shall use this extension to transfer to the workers, under trade union supervision, certain of the functions of workshop discipline and organization that are at present in the hands of foremen and supervisors appointed by the employers to order the workers about...
...But on the whole the new recruits to both grammar schools and universities tend to come much more from the poorer section of the middle classes than from the families of manual workers—and to Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 321 come hardly at all from the less skilled sections of the manual working class...
...As the Government now meets a large part of the cost of higher education and professional training, it is no longer reasonable for the incomes of those who have received this help to be calculated at rates meant to pay back the expenses of their professional preparation...
...Is the answer that the Labor Government of 1945 had no mandate to introduce a socialist system, but only to carry through certain social reforms representing an advance towards the Welfare State, and to nationalize certain industries and services only on condition of not socializing the property rights of their previous owners...
...but no such excuse can be put forward for the growing practice of authorizing trade union and cooperative leaders to stick "Sir" in front of their names...
...For a long time now, many of them have given up talking socialism and have been talking instead about nationalization and the Welfare State...
...I feel sure that many politicians who are professed socialists, and not a few Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 317 of their active supporters, have lost the simple faith in socialism with which most of them began—and which, up to a point, they still hold to with part of their minds—and have come to entertain doubts whether the attempt to establish socialism does not involve too great risks for the game to be worth the candle...
...He cannot, indeed, be expected to have this sense of responsibility where businesses are still being carried on for the profit of absentee shareholders, or where the management still behaves as a caste of superiors issuing orders to inferiors to whom it recognizes no democratic responsibility...
...They are still, however, in this country only a small group, not at all comparable with the much bigger labor aristocracy that has grown up in the United States...
...This is a very natural desire, not only because politicians naturally prefer winning to losing, but also because they honestly believe that they have a better case than their opponents...
...But what is the use of winning an election, except as a means to an end...
...and it is reasonable to plead that the Labor Government could not have gone beyond what it did without seeking a fresh mandate...
...No doubt, some children of manual workers get their higher education rather through technical schools and colleges than through grammar schools and universities...
...The public would thus acquire holdings of capital in what are now private enterprises by a double process—through the lapsing of shares to it at the owners' deaths and through the new shares to be created out of profits placed in reserve...
...Indeed, I feel sure that trade union representation on National Boards can be desirable only after a measure of real "workers' control" has been established in this more real form—if even then...
...and with it, over a much wider field, goes the non-rational resistance to a change of traditional attitudes which rest on the long experience of exploitation to which the workers as a class have been subjected...
...and the long-run effect would be to, establish socialized production over a wide field without setting up giant organizations in forms of enterprise better suited to relatively small-scale, and within limits competitive, operation...
...That is the rational objection...
...This kind of test looks like leading to a new class structure which will on the one hand cut the working class in two—those with a chance of rising further and those without— and will on the other animate the upper of these two segments with a desire to protect itself against the lower, and also permeate it with a belief in the virtue of personal advancement and in the values of an acquisitive society...
...Moreover, these gains have been secured at the expense of a narrowing of the differentials awarded for most, though not for all, kinds of superior manual skill, and may be reacting on the future supply of skilled workers by making it less worth while to learn a skilled trade...
...I believe this to be nonsense: I do not Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 325 profess to know whether the supply of real first-raters can be greatly increased by improving our educational system...
...This brings us back to the question how far it is psychologically possible or socially desirable for the workers and their organizations to accept any sort of responsibility for the efficiency of profit-making industry...
...and this is still in the main a class barrier, though it has been moved further down the social scale...
...We are in no present danger of losing our rights of free speech or association, or of passing under the control of a "one-party" State machine...
...but most managements are incapable of achieving this and will continue to be so as long as they represent a business structure in the control of which the workers have no share...
...What a man is at his work he will tend to be also in his pleasure and in his activities as a citizen...
...We are grateful to Mr...
...Social ownership will not of itself put matters right, as the experience both of the nationalized industries and of cooperative employment abundantly shows...
...These arguments are so strong as to be conclusive against collaboration, save under certain indispensable conditions...
...They would constitute the reality of "workers' control" where the putting of a few trade union nominees on National Boards would give only the appearance of it...
...But they constitute a new and growing labor aristocracy, with "money to burn" because they are only now adjusting their living standards to their increased earnings...
...We have seen already how, by means of the abolition of large inheritances, the ownership of existing capital assets could be transferred to the public by stages not too prolonged...
Vol. 1 • September 1954 • No. 4
