The best treatment for George

By an shop steward workers, the present wage paid for 41 hours will be maintained for the 40-hour week.

Adult male manual workers on in the budget he says: 'There must be a mixed number two in the ] Labour government. is very m uch in the news these days. He is certainly a politician to watch. Ever ready, in words, to express sympathy for the underdog, in practice he carries through policies in sup port of the employers.

In this respect, his speech on the Budget was a classic which repays study After claiming that the buaget aldea redistribution of incomes-for which there is no shred of evidence, quite the contrary— he spoke strongly in defence of profits.

The Budget, 'The Times' reports him as saying, 'was not an attack on profits, they [i.e., the Labour government] believed profits as one of the motivating forces in the economy. What he said later on about making the economy more efficient has to be seen in the light of this concern.

He went out of his way to thank the two bosses' organisations, the Federation of British Industries and the British Employers' Federation, for their cooperation in drawing up the incomes policy statement. Yet later on he drew attention to the fact that 'Britain had been bypassed by the second Industrial Revolution' and was behind its rivals in the use of computers and ollier advanced lechniques.

Technological lag The reason for this technological lag is not far to seek. British industrialists have reaped handsome profits in the past 15 years without the need to replace obsolete equipment or expand into new fields.

What can Mr. Brown do about this if he is not prepared to make an attack on profits?

There is only one thing he can do, that is to make it profitable for industrialists to change.

The unavowed purpose of the incomes policy is to reduce real wages so that fewer goods can be bought on the home market and higher profits made from exports. Out of these higher profits, or so theory has it, business will then be able to invest more and improve the competitive position of British industry in the world market.

Profits must be maintained and increased, such is the philosophy of Mr. Brown. Meanwhile, he says: "The main source of faster growth must be a more rapid increase in output per man.' To the bosses he says: we will not attack your profits and we will get workers to produce more, so that they will actually grow faster.

Meanwhile, Mr. Brown is preparing to put this policy over to the trade unions at regional and local levels. No doubt, with the help of right-wing officials, more "package deals' will be proposed.

Co-operation As for business, the 300 biggest firms have now received a polite note from Mr. Brown 'asking them to make their full contribution to the campaign to strengthen the balance of payments'. As he put it: 'We are looking forward to their response with confidence' Brown looks forward to the co-operation of both sides of industry: those whose labour grinds out the surplus from which profits come and those into whose lap they fall.

Instead of proposing the nationalization of the 300 companies which form the basis of monopoly capitalism in Britain he promises them support, of which a wages freeze is the main item.

'There will be a mixed economy in this country as far ahead as we can see. The boundary of the public sector will undoubtedly move forward from time to time. Whatever the relative size, the essential point is that both sectors in a mixed economy must improve and expand, said Mr. Brown in the concluding part of his speech.

True he threw in, for the benefit of the so-called "left' economy' MPs, a phrase about not restricting the scope of public enterprises just because they are publicly owned. And he ended with some more of the characteristic demagogy which earns standing ovations at constituency meetings.

But what is the real substance of all this? Any pretence at working towards socialism is clearly abandoned as far ahead as we can see'. How long is that? Ten years, fifty? No matter.

Handmaiden The Labour government, as stands out from Brown's speech, is committed to a 'mixed economy' based on profit. Nationalized industry will continue to be the handmaiden of the monopolies. Profits will not be attacked. Capitalists can be reassured.

Of course, this policy of a "mixed economy' for 'as far ahead as we can see' is not only George Brown's policy. It is the policy of the whole Labour government which is endorsed by the rank-and-file MPs, however "left' they may strive to look, every time they vote for the measures to carry it out. It is not just an interim policy for a government with a small majority. It is a policy, let it be said again, for 'as far ahead as we cán see' Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution, which calls for nationalization of all basic industry, has been quietly dropped overboard despite the decisions of the Labour Party Conference to retain it. The rank and file should not be taken in by the demagogy of Wilson, Brown and Co.

The policy of these people is to hand the working class over, bound and gagged, to be exploited more effectively by the monopoly capitalists. Determined resistance and the building of an alternative leadership can defeat them.

AS a regular reader may f point out that Peter Arnold's article 'Wilson and de Gaulle seek economic entente' in last week's Newsletter contains some strange formulations which, I think, are bound to create confusion in the minds of many readers.

It suffers from a rigidly mechanical approach to capitalism's crisis. The author, for example, uses the words 'collapse of the imperialist power system' in his introductory sentence. What does this mean?

Marxists have always been careful to define this process as a 'deep crisis' or as the 'decline' or 'death agony'-but never the 'collapse' This seems to indicate a sort of mechanical motion, an objective event which we cannot influence. From the same standpoint, it can also be argued that socialism is inevitable.

This mechanistic determinism is recurrent in the article.

In the reference to the pre-war Germany, a clear inference emerges that fascism was nothing more than an attempt by the German ruling class to restore the productive plant destroyed by the First World War. On the contrary, the German capitalists restored and augmented their productive plant with American loans under the Young and Dawes plans some years before Hitler came to power.

This is what Trotsky said about it in 1926:

"The number unemployed in Germany has passed the two million mark. Owing to the rationalisation of production skilled workers comprise about three-quarters of the total unemployed' ('Whither Eul ope', speech by Trotsky to R ussian audience in 1926)