An Inspector Calls: There's Trouble at T' Mill
If you are retired or unemployed and forced to fill in your time by watching television during the day there is one sure thing the television programmers will give you to watch: repeats.
One notable repeat is the 1954 film, AN INSPECTOR CALLS, adapted from the 1945 play by J. B. Priestly and written for the screen by Desmond Davis. Set in 1912, the film stars Alastair Sim as an Inspector looking into the suicide of a working class girl, Eva Smith. The inspector appears at a dinner party given by the successful mill owner, Mr Birling, and his wife celebrating the engagement of their daughter to the son of an old county family. The visit by the Inspector to the Birling's house, we learn, is because her death is linked to each family member having known her at various times of Eva Smith's short life.
In a series of flashbacks, the tragic life of the mill girl is revealed. She is first exploited at work and then sacked by the father, Mr Birling, for organising a strike for more pay, then dismissed from her job when working as a shop assistant because of the jealousy and spite of the daughter, kept as a mistress by the fiance, humiliated by the mother when asking for charity and raped and made pregnant by the son. All very melodramatic, but it is also a moral criticism of capitalism and the lack of social responsibility of the ruling class towards the poor and exploited.
The first flashback in the film sees Eva Smith, as part of a deputation of striking mill girls, wanting a pay rise. They are led into the mill owner's office where they are given an economic lecture by the owner on the reality of capitalism. The script of the film differs from the play by giving the owner more time to give his excuse for refusing their pay demands.
The owner tells the workers:
"If I gave in to your demands, if costs went up ten percent, prices would go up ten percent. If that happened the factory will close down. And you would be out of work. Satisfied?"
The mill girl, Eva, says "No", she is not satisfied with his explanation.
And Birling tells her that she would have to remain unsatisfied. He tells her that "we are paying the usual rates".
But she replies "But what if you can't live on them"
He tells her "You have to go and work somewhere else. It is a free country after all".
She answers back; "And what's the use of that if you can't get work elsewhere"
.
And he concludes by stating "I'm sorry that is of no concern of mine."
The women are led meekly out of the office and the mill girl, Eva, who spoke up to contradict Mr Birling, is summarily dismissed from employment as a "trouble maker".
This was the first dramatic step towards her eventual suicide.
After watching the film a number of times the owner's "justification" of not giving a pay rise to the striking mill girls had a familiar ring to it. It was similar to the argument of the Owenite carpenter, John Weston in Marx's pamphlet, VALUE,PRICE AND PROFIT. It is a similar argument to one put to workers today by employers when workers ask for a pay rise.
When employers' whinge and moan against the success of a pay rise by workers they claim that it will mean rising prices for commodities and services, businesses shutting down and workers losing their jobs. Just like Mr Birling in AN INSPECTOR CALLS. According to employers, workers should just stay compliant and quiescent. They should just do as they are told and be grateful for the wages they receive.
As Karl Marx explained, wage increases don't affect the prices of goods and commodities; they only reduce profit rates for capitalists. Marx offers a different explanation. Unfortunately Marx's explanation is not advanced in the film or in the play. Only one side of the argument - from the perspective of the capitalist class - is given by Mr Birling.
The play and film is supposed to be socialist in content. This is not true. Socialism and the case for socialism are both absent. So too is a comprehensive critique of capitalism. The case for socialism is not based on morality but the outcome of an understanding and rejection of the profit system. And that understanding is sorely lacking in the film. At the end of the film the audience would want social reforms not social revolution.
So it is to Marx we have to turn to understand how Eva Smith should have replied to the Mill owner, Mr Birling: how she should have answered back. Only a Marxian account of economics can redress the balance and show the reality of the situation from the interest and perspective of the working class.
Value, Price and Profit
And the best place to start with is an address delivered by Marx at two sessions of the council of the first International on June 20 and 27, 1865. The paper was edited after Marx's death by his daughter, Eleanor Marx and published as VALUE,PRICE AND PROFIT in 1898. Just 14 years before the date when the AN INSPECTOR CALLS is set.
Marx uses a terminology that is difficult on a first reading, although it is easier than reading CAPITAL. However it pays reading and re-reading. Once the concepts have been grasped a Mr Birling or one of his political representatives will not be able to prattle on about "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work". You will be able to argue back. You will be able to stand on your own two feet. You will be pursuing your class interest at the expense of the employer.
In his lecture, Marx argued against the viewpoint of John Weston. Weston believed that an increase in wages will not improve the conditions of the workers and that trade union organisation, because of its harmful impact on industry, is detrimental to the material interests of the working class.
In replying to Weston, Marx located the source of all profit - not in the fluctuations of commodity prices - but in the surplus value extracted from workers by capital. Under capitalism, Marx argued, it can seem like "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work". Nothing could be further from the truth.
Workers spend part of the working day producing commodities to make enough money to cover what Marx calls the 'necessaries' of life: housing, clothes, food, and so on. If it takes, say, the first half of the day (necessary working time) to make enough wages to cover those necessities, the rest of the working day is essentially spent making profit for the capitalist, the owner of the business, the Mr Birling's of the world. This is "surplus labour time", the period when the workers are creating surplus value, the source of the unearned income going to the capitalist class in the form of rent, interest and profit.
As Marx puts it, the worker is essentially working for nothing for a part of the working day:
"Although one part only of the workman's daily labour is paid, while the other part is unpaid, and while that unpaid or surplus labour constitutes exactly the fund out of which surplus value or profit is formed, it seems as if the aggregate labour was paid labour" (VALUE,PRICE AND PROFIT, International Publishers, 1976 pp 42-43).
Marx showed that the effect of wage increase is to reduce the surplus value for the capitalist and therefore to lower the rate of profit. The rate of profit is surplus value in proportion to the invested capital. The increase or decrease of the paid labour and the corresponding increase or decrease of surplus value occurs within the limits of the total amount of new material values created by the workers.
If the wages rise, the workers will improve the level of what they need to live on. But the capitalist, like Birling, will still get his surplus value that covers his industrial profit, interest payments to the bank and rent to the landlord. If the workers do not fight for wage increase, the capitalist will just continue increasing the surplus value that he gets.
The dogma that "wages determine the price of commodities" is erroneous because it presumes that the rise or fall of wages determines the prices of commodities in the market. According to the market conditions of supply and demand for the commodities at various times, the prices of commodities fluctuate.
However the price of commodities fluctuate around the value of the commodities determined by the socially necessary labour power which go into their production, and not by the wages paid by the capitalist to the workers. This is what Eva Smith should have said in her reply to Mr Birling, but she didn't.
Marx pointed out the capitalists cannot simply raise prices at their will, because they are subject to the pressures of supply and demand.
Abolish the Wages System
In the class struggle between workers and employers Marx highlights the important material class interest of the worker which is diametrically opposite to the capitalist. There can be no common relationship between capital and labour, no partnerships and no social harmony. Workers live in a class divided society in which the capitalist class own the means of production and distribution to the exclusion of everybody else.
Capitalists have to exploit the working class. They have no choice in the matter if they want to remain capitalists. They have to make profit, accumulate capital and expand value.
When workers struggle for higher wages or against wage cuts, according to Marx, they are attempting to:
"...set limits to the tyrannical usurpations of capital. Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation." (p. 53-54).
Workers have to struggle against employers. If the working class did not struggle against the encroachment of capital Marx said that:
"...they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation" (p.61)
And
"they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement" (p. 61)
And by "any larger movement" Marx meant a socialist movement capable of taking the class struggle politically to the capitalist class. The class struggle is ultimately a struggle over the ownership of the means of production and distribution and what they are used for.
Marx concluded his talk by saying:
"Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system" (p. 61).
A social reformer and moral sentimentalist like Priestley would never advocate the conclusion Marx gave at the end of his lecture. Priestley thought you could create a better society by changing the attitude of the capitalist class towards the poor. He would be a supporter of "philanthrocapitalism" propagated by Bill and Melinda Gates. It is forgotten that these "philanthropists" have amassed a fortune from extracting surplus value from the working class. Capitalists and workers do not share the same class interests there can be no reconciliation of the classes. Birling or Gates? Socialism needs neither.
Priestly was no socialist. Though never a member of the Labour Party, he supported many of their policies and was encouraged by their landslide victory. Priestly looked to the enactment of social reforms as the way to solve the poverty of the working class. It never crossed his mind that workers could actually take democratic and political action as socialists and replace the capitalist cause of poverty with socialism. He was a social reformer not a socialist. He did not want a socialist revolution. Marx did.
Passive Actors or Active Socialists?
In both the play and film, Eva Smith remains the symbol of the working class existing in a heartless and cruel social system but has no idea how to change society for the better. Striking for higher wages is the best she can do. She is a passive actor. She cannot think and act in class terms. Politically, she has the vote but there the political engagement ends. In Priestley's world, you vote for someone else not yourself. You vote to retain capitalism not to change it.
So the play and the film address the need for change in society but not fundamental and revolutionary change. Priestly has a warning for those who, he believes, can do something for the working class but choose not to. He does not accept that there needs to be a class divided society but instead one where the classes can live harmoniously together. He does not consider a classless society of free men and women. In the Inspector's final speech we are told that if there is not a change of heart and mind within the ruling class there will be violent consequences:
"But just remember this One Eva Smith has gone - but there are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, and what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish".
This is not too dissimilar to views made by politicians at the time of the play's premier in 1945. A senior Tory, the future Lord Hailsham, had warned the capitalists in 1943, 'If you don't give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution' (Socialist Party of Great Britain, BEVERIDGE ORGANISES POVERTY, 1943). The SPGB pamphlet went on to show that the Beveridge Plan would not end the poverty of the working-class. It was not a "new world" of hope but a redistribution of poverty.
Priestly wants our pity and guilt. His is a morality play, a type of religious play with its origins in feudal society, like PRIDE OF LIFE (1350) and EVERYMAN (1495). The play demands social responsibility from the rich and powerful for their salvation, the idea that a society's poorer members should be helped by those who have more than them. Priestley wants egalitarian distribution of social wealth but the retention of the profit system and class ownership of the means of production. It is a contradiction which the social reformer can never resolve. Private property interests always win out.
Eva Smith's movement through the play and film is a downward spiral of social degradation leading to an unpleasant and painful suicide. She represents the treatment of women and the working class generally in 1912 Britain. Yet an organised socialism already existed at the time: The Socialist Party of Great Britain. The SPGB's object was quite clear: the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
And the SPGB did not advocate violent revolution but, instead, argued for a socialist majority to democratically and politically organise into a political party with only socialism as its objective. A socialist majority would send socialist delegates to seats of political power to gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, allowing for a peaceful and revolutionary transformation of the society from production for profit to production directly and solely for social use. It would mean the abolition of capitalism.
Eva Smith is not allowed the political wit and wherewithal to become a socialist, to stand on her only two feet and answer Birling's defence of capitalism. She is denied even trade union protection. She is denied access to Marxian economics - indispensable knowledge in understanding the profit system - and she is denied a socialist future, only a cruel and horrible death.
Social Reform or Social Revolution?
Priestley's paternalism ends with the belief that a labour government has all the answers; the welfare state and the National Health Service. In 1942 Beveridge had already published his report "Social Insurance and Allied Services". His report was a proposal for widespread reforms to the system of social welfare to abolish what he identified as "five giants on the road of reconstruction: Want, disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". Beveridge, a eugenicist, believed these five social problems could be solved by government reform.
The play was written just before the 1945 election and the film was released two years after the Labour government was thrown out of office when the heady optimism of the early post war years had turned sour. It is ironic that the play opened first in Leningrad, in the USSR. Paisley, who went to see the play performed in Moscow, was cushioned from the reality of the Russian dictatorship by the hospitality provided by Writers' Group of the Society for Cultural Relations with USSR. Orwell thought Priestley a fellow traveller and put him on his infamous list of Soviet propagandists which he passed on to the British Government's Information Research Department at the the Foreign Office. Never trust a snitch.
Although it is with good reason that Orwell denounced Priestley as a "fellow traveller". Priestley's pamphlet RUSSIAN JOURNEY, published in 1946, based on articles he wrote for the DAILY EXPRESS, owned at the time by Lord Beaverbrook, painted the Soviet Union in a good light. It must have been a propaganda coup for the Soviet authorities. Today, it reads like servile apologetics.
In Priestley's articles there was no criticism of Stalin or his regime. No comment was made of the show trials or the gulags filled with political prisoners. Of the purges which killed millions, not a word. Nothing was said about the famine in the Ukraine in 1932 which killed millions. The grim and bleak lives of the working class were excused by Priestley as the consequences of the recent war with Germany and not as a result of the imposition of state capitalism by the Russian dictatorship.
According to Priestley it was a "famous legend that the visitor to Russia is constantly spied on" (p. 4) There were no secret police in Russia "unless they were disguised as sparrows" (p.4). There was no "class system" (p 5). The destruction of the Kulaks was barely mentioned (p. 8) before he went on to eulogise the collective farms and the happy workers working on them.
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/russian-journey-by-j-b-priestley-1946
Portraying Russia in a good light to the readers of a British newspaper with a large circulation must have incensed Orwell. Orwell's experiences in Spain, culminating in his and his wife's narrow escape from the communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, led him to become a bitter anti-Stalinist and one of the first cold war warriors (see HOMAGE TO CATALONIA 1938).
The Labour welfare state and the USSR were the twin social failures of the Twentieth Century. And both the Labour Party and the USSR did detrimental harm to the advancement of socialism. All five of the social problems identified by Beveridge still exist today and will continue to exist until capitalism is replaced by socialism. Capitalism cannot solve poverty since the profit system creates hunger, poor housing, lack of heath care, unemployment and social misery in the first place. The Socialist Party of Great Britain had already anticipated the failure of Atlee's government in BEVERIDGE RE-ORGANISES POVERTY (1943), FAMILY ALLOWANCES: A SOCIALIST ANALYSIS (1943) and state capitalism in NATIONALISATION OR SOCIALISM (1945). It is a pity Priestly never read them.
As for the USSR, the SPGB had this to say in QUESTIONS OF THE DAY (1932), in the section of the pamphlet looking at Russian capitalism:
"The Bolshevik attempt to usher in Socialism by "legal enactments" and by "bold leaps" before the economic conditions were ripe, and before the mass of the population desired socialism, has been a total failure, In the course of time that failure will become obvious to the workers inside and outside Russia" (THE RUSSIAN DICTATORSHIP p.58).
1932 was the year of the famine in the Soviet Union. Much of the hugely abundant wheat crop harvested by the Ukrainian workers that year was sold on the world market to generate capital to aid Stalin's Five Year Plan for the modernization of the Soviet Union and also to help finance his massive military build-up. If the wheat had remained in the Ukraine, it was estimated to have been enough to feed all of the people there for up to two years.
https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm
Priestly did not see the failure of the USSR in 1945 but that conclusion had already been reached by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1932, some thirteen years earlier (see also RUSSIA SINCE 1917, reprint of articles from the SOCIALIST STANDARD showing that the Russian upheaval on 1917 could not have been a socialist revolution). With the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991 the failure of the Bolsheviks has become all too obvious to everyone.
AN INSPECTOR CALLS is studied in many British schools as one of the prescribed texts for the English Literature General Certificate. It is a reformist not a socialist play, as is the film. Marx, wanting the abolition of capitalism and the wages system, is proscribed by the current government as too dangerous for children to know.