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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, p.29.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Paupers
Bill Jordan
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 80p.
‘A FAMILY can join the claiming class at the stroke of a Whitehall pen, but nothing but a major increase in its earnings can put it back in the working class again.’
So Bill Jordan describes what sociologists genteelly refer to as the ‘poverty trap’: the complex system of welfare benefits that means a worker is often better off if he’s unemployed.
‘Better off’ financially, that is. None of the one million plus who’ve experienced life on the dole would argue that the state feels any real responsibility for the unproductive unemployed – who are anything but affluent consumers, either.
Jordan’s book describes the growth of Newton Abbott Claimants’ Union. Set up in 1971 as a co-operative venture, with its members digging a collective allotment and distributing beans and lettuces to fellow-claimants, its focus has changed as the members became more politically aware. He rightly points out that by the introduction of Family Income Supplement in 1970 the Tories were echoing their policy in 1795, when the Speenhamland system allowed wages to be supplemented out of public funds – subsidising employers rather than demanding a basic minimum wage. The Tories were motivated then, as now, by fears of riots and alarm that workers could not afford the goods they produced, leading to an adverse effect on the economy. No thought of tampering with the profits, of course.
Jordan admits that they were naive at first From the allotment scheme grew the idea of CU members doing casual work and handing their wages over to a collective fund. When the Supplementary Benefits Commission suspended two CU members from benefit for working for gain, they appealed, and ultimately won their case, establishing an important precedent. In those early days they felt that because of the high level of unemployment in Devon, the SBC would be morally unable to stop them. But the Poor Law lives on!
Their self-help scheme also met with hostility from the labour movement. The shocked reaction of trade union officials to CUs has revealed sharply the extent of the gulf between the union bureaucrats, in league with the interests of big business, and their rank-and-file members. In all the meetings held by the Labour Party and trades councils on unemployment, they have heard simply ‘stale rhetoric and empty promises’. When they asked the local Co-op for help, the response was ‘Sorry, we only sell milk here’!
Experience since 1970 has taught the CU members that self-help schemes and fighting individual claims do not in themselves challenge the system that creates wage slavery and planned unemployment. In Newton Abbott itself, the CU and local power workers united to fight a prod deal that would have meant a pay rise of £5 a week – and redundancy for 12 men. Their alliance was contrary to ETU policy, but it showed up workers’ increasing dissatisfaction with the conciliatory role played by TU officials.
Jordan provides a perceptive and readable analysis of successive governments’ welfare policies, and of the misplaced energies expended by groups like CPAG, who seek to maximise the benefits paid to claimants, tinkering with minor reforms and failing to demand at the same time the abolition of the system as a whole.
But his disillusionment with the Labour Party and the trade union movement forces him too far in the opposite direction. The anger and frustration felt by claimants may well explode on the streets (as it did in the US and in a different guise in Ireland) – but without a political orientation the protests will tail away. It is wishful, libertarian thinking to say as he does, that the claiming class, rather than the working ckss, will offer real resistance to capitalism as a system. True, claimants know at first hand the undisguised class nature of society and its lack of concern for the reserve pool of labour sitting ‘like cans of peas on a shelf.
Claimants have no choice but to reject the ‘alienating affluence of the technological kingdom of profit’; but this Owenite picture misses the point. Neither claimants or workers would reject a decent living wage and the advantages of affluence and technology. We simply demand that we should control that technology. And only an alliance between all the members of the working class, whether redundant railwaymen or carworkers, can build a revolutionary movement capable of transferring the power to where it belongs.
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