the elimination of other jobs unnecessary in a workers' state-for example, social security investigators, private detectives and the like-a cutting pack or jobs in this area of only 5U per cent would generate £2, 100 million for productive employment. This would, for example, allow the house building programme to be more than doubled. Multi-coloured Omo packets and free plastic daffodils before housesthat is a current slogan of capitalism.
Providing work for those released from unproductive industries would provide no problem in a planned economy. Only in the anarchic economic system of capitalism can the scourge of unemployment exist. Even in a bureaucratically planned economy such as the Soviet Union, unemployment simply does not exist. Under capitalism, however, astronomical resources are wasted in this way-even leaving aside the enormous human misery involved.
The American economist Leon Henderson has estimated that the losses of earnings of United States workers during the depression of the 1930s totalled around 300,000 million dollars. The 1949 recession in the United States alone led to a fall in output of 16,500 million dollars together with another 7,000 million dollars that would have come from "normal' growth. The losses of the American recession of 1957-58 were in the order of 50,000 million dollars.
The same irrationalities and waste exist in Britain today. There is a tremendous shortage of houses, schools, hospitais and so on, yet 150,000 building workers are unemployed. Unemployment in Britain today stands officially at just under a million, but if account is taken of those who do not register as unemployed, those who would look for work if they thought jobs were available and so on, then the real figures are far higher-probably anywhere between 1½-3 million. If only 1¼ million of these-a very low figure- were employed and produced the ouput of an average worker, this would increase production a year by £3,500 million: This does not even take If we take just these immediate and obvious cases of the absurd misuse and non-use of resources by capitalism, then the total savings are immense.
Group, on whose calculations we have drawn heavily, find une following as the immediate •Ending upper class consumpnon •Cutting military expenditure •Eliminating waste and redundant services •Creating full employment To get some idea of what that means, we need only note that it is roughly £16 a week for every family of four; six times the annual expenditure on house-building; three times that on pensions; and twice total investment. saving would mean that wages could be increased by a quarter; or that six times as many houses could be built; or that pensions could be tripled or investment doubled; or some mix of all these could be decided upon.
Of couse nothing is more useless than utopian schemes for socialism. No plan and no statistics are a substitute for the struggles which must be waged now-for the sliding scale of wages and public expenditure, for work-sharing with no loss of pay, for nationalisation of all firms creating redundancy, for workers control-but there is no doubt that drawing up a plan for expropriating capitalist industry and re-organising it on a socialist basis can be a real spur to these struggles.
• SOCIALIST PLAN • To show concretely how to finance these measures on inflation and unemploymentthrough 100% tax on all incomes over £10,000, through the ending of capitalist military expenditure, through the elimination of unemployment, through the re-allocation of jobs from waste industries, through the nationalisation of the 250 leading monopolies-shows the working class the concrete way it can find an outcome for its struggles. It is for this reason that the IMG has put forward the slogan for 'A Trade Union Plan for the National• MAT ITT The Cambridge Political Economy £1,400 million £2,000 million £4,900 million achieved by a socialist revolution. £3,500 million £11,800 million tion.
Such a 110 years. of the world FOR To see what this means in practical terms we need only look at housing. If the target of 500,000 houses a year had been achieved in that period-and this again is not a very ambitious target, as in proportion to the population it has already been exceeded by West Germany, Holland, France and Denmark-then there would be 4 million more houses in Britain today than existed at the end of 1973. And all this is without taking into account considerations such as the enormous release of the ingenuity and inventiveness of the working class that would be What could be achieved on an international scale and with a world economy defies descripBut if we take 1962 as a base year, then we find that an increase in the growth rate of the West European economies from 5% to 10% would make it possible to surpass the standard of living in the United States within less than ten years. By raising the growth rate of the American economy from 3% to 7% the standard of living in that country could be doubled in It is within this perspective, also, that the real international alternative to the EEC-the United Socialist States of Europe-can be seen. For decades the productive forces of Europe have suffocated in narrow national boundaries. Two world wars have been the result, On the basis of modern science and modern means of production what could be achieved is virtually limitless. It would allow a rapid reduction of the working week, a complete reorganisation of the cities, abolition of the stinking slums of capitalism, and vast economic support ** The figures and other material in this article have been for the countries of the "Third World'. A planned and integrated European economy would be the greatest productive force in the history to this is also mind-boggling. A country such as the United States, with the greatest productive power ever known in history and with scientific and technical resources which are virtually unlimited, finds itself in a situation where nearly 10% of its workers are unemployed and where output acutally fell by around 5% in the last part of 1974 and the early part of 1975. In these countries unemployment stood at a ¡total of 15 million at the beginning of 1975.
A UNITED Of course the elimination of this crazy system of capitalism will hurt some people. In Britain the top 100 firms account for more than half of industrial production and a takeover of the top 250 firms would bring virtually all production under control. These firms undoubtedly wouldn't be too pleased by the outcome. However as the top 80% of all personally neld shares are owned by 1% ot wealth holders with 96% held by 5% of wealth holders, we really don't think too many people will be troubled by that.
•THE ALTERNATIVE• As for what will occur if the rule of the bourgeoisie is not destroyed, there should be no illusions as to what that will mean. Capitalism at the moment is only getting warmed up for what a real economic crash means. In the great crash of 1929-and it is bourgeois econom ists as well as Marxists who predict that the slump which is going to come in 1977-78 may be even worse than 1929-production fell by a third in the United States. In a country such as Germany the real income of the working class fell by 10% in four years for employed workers, and by 1933 two workers out of five were unemployed. In Britain 22% of the working population was unemployed by 1932 The political outcome of this type of economic collapse is very obvious. To capitalism's usual complement of inflation, unemploy ment, waste, racism and the oppression of women is added fascism and war. There is no doubt that when the crash comes again capitalism will be lining up the same answers only this time it will be an Adolf Hitler with nuclear weapons and scientific methods of torture and extermination, making the Gestapo and the SS look like rank amateurs. Horrors such as the Chilean and Brazilian military regimes, whose specialities include tossing children onto bayonets in front of their parents and chopping people up to send to their wives through the post-with American subsidies of course-are what the democratic"
ruling classes of the world are accomplices in at present. Don't believe that their tactics for us will be any different.
************* *ACKNOWLEDGEMENT drawn from the work of many socialists: Particularly * valuable although we disagree with their practical * conclusions-are the articles by Bob Rowthorne and * the Camiridge Political Economy Group in Marxism Britain's Economic Crisis. For a theoretical analysis, *Ernest Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory provides *the main framework. Also very useful are: Mandel* Europe versus America; Eaton, Coates and Barratt*Brown-An Alternative Economic Strategy for the Labour Movement; Barratt-Brown-After Imperialism;
Tony Cliff-Social Contract or Socialism?; UCS: The • Social Audit, by the Institute for Workers' Control; Two Nations, by the Labour Research Department; *The Red Paper, by Ernie Roberts and others. ************************