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How much would you pay for a bottle of wine? If you can only run to plonk from Tesco or Sainsbury you are unlikely to have been an enthusiastic participant in the recent auction of the contents of West Green House, the Hampshire home of Lord McAlpine, when bottles of something called Chateau de la Tour were going for around £500
You see Lord McAlpine, who is the kind of jolly, informal fellow who likes to be known to one and all as 'Alastair', is a bon viveur and. as any shopper knows, that means he would look on supermarket plonk as only a little less intolerable than strychnine. Selling up his home does not mean that the noble lord is on the slippery slope which ends in Cardboard City; it's just that he had a fancy to move to another sumptuous place with another collection of antiques, art treasures and all the little bits and pieces which make life bearable for a bon viveur.
He was also, until recently, the treasurer of the Conservative Party, a job which did not entail his growing pigeon-chested over fusty ledgers since it mainly consisted of extracting generous donations to party funds from other exceedingly rich people. His background (Stowe public school, where he managed three ’O' levels) and his present circumstances (inheritor of massive wealth and a powerful position in the McAlpine building firm founded by his great grandfather) made him ideally suited for the job. It is said that in the 1987 election he screwed some £23 million out of his fellow tycoons.
Election realities
As part of his fund-raising during that election McAlpine sent a copy of the Labour Party manifesto to 200 selected top business people. The implication was clear; a Labour government would cost them a lot of money. The fact that this is nonsense — as only a cursory knowledge of recent history reveals - shows how little capitalism is understood even by the capitalists whose privileges are nurtured by the system. But to return to those Labour manifestos: when the parties of capitalism go into an election they do so on the assurance that they stand for the interests of all the people. Vote for us. runs their argument, allow us to implement our programme, and everyone will benefit. McAlpine's ruse, highly successful as it was, reveals the truth that elections are fought over which section of the minority ruling class should be that much richer and more secure, over which investments should receive more protection, over which proposals for working class exploitation promise to be more intense and profitable
McAlpine once informed the House of Lords that he was " . . . the builder of the National Theatre". This kind of assertion is often made by capitalists, we hear of them designing buildings, laying out gardens, building houses and so on when in fact they are not to be seen doing any such thing. McAlpine may have dropped in on tho site of the National Theatre — it was a prestigious enough project to warrant his interest in its progress — but he didn't actually sketch it out on a drawing board, or mix the cement or slap down tho bricks or hang the doors This work was carried out by members of the class who need to work for their living and who got a wage which does not allow them to drink Chateau de la Tour. They build places like the National Theatre and West Green House and they live in mortgaged semis or flats or rented bedsits. And at elections they are so impressed by the specious arguments of people like McAlpine that they surge out to vote to keep his class in power and privilege and their own class in exploitation and poverty. Our class has to eat supermarket food, wear supermarket clothes, live in supermarket houses. But this does not mean we have to have supermarket ideas.
Political packaging
The question is — is there some connection between supermarkets and tired, discredited political non-theories? We only ask because there is. apparently, no truth in the rumour that David Sainsbury is about to apply to join the Labour Party This member of a famous, exceedingly rich family whose fortune is channelled through those clattering check-outs where tho operators have little time or motivation to make any human contact with the patiently-shuffling customers and their laden trolleys, was a valued contributor to the late, unlamented Social Democratic Party. Did he, we wonder, receive one of those manifestos from Lord McAlpine? With the collapse of tho SDP there was a hopeful casting of bait among the partyless members by Liberal and Labour and Sainsbury would be a very juicy catch for them. But he has stated that ho remains loyal to the mould breakers even though they hardly exist any more
As a supermarket chief Sainsbury is probably well versed in the theories about the sales appeal of attractive packaging. So was the SDP, whose favourable attention from the media went some way to disguise the fact that they had little more to offer than bits and pieces of the failed policies of the other parties which they were so ambitious to replace. The same can be said about their leaders, who were supposed to have discovered the cleansing relevance of something called moderation. Jenkins. Owen. Williams and Rodgers had all held office in a Labour government and it took a lot of opaque packaging to obscure their association with the impotence of that government to make capitalism work as they had promised
Well this is all history and some history it was: the risible Alliance and then the chaos of the attempted merger with the Liberals and Owen's refusal to accept a vote which went against his wishes. Now he is no longer leading a party, which leaves just Rosie Barnes and John Cartwright, neither of them sure about who is leading whom. And all of this disreputable manoeuvring has been within the party who said it would not play the old game of party politics. So the mould remains unbroken. The SDP deserves, and will probably get. no more than a footnote in British political history
Will Sainsbury stay with them? Whatever he decides, it need not concern the check-out operators nor the queues in his shops Whichever government has held power Sainsbury has continued to prosper; capitalism has gone on its way undisturbed. The company's slogan is that in their shops Good Food Costs Less. What price consistent, viable political principles?
Political pollution
When supermarkets came on the scene thy were recommended to us as part of something called the Retailing Revolution. What that meant was the abolition of the system where customers stood at shop counters while assistants weighed up sugar, biscuits, butter and the like — and knew something about the stuff. This was replaced by the system in which the customer took the stuff off the shelves, which meant that it had to be pre-packed and that brought in another thing called the Packaging Revolution. People who tear their nails trying to get at a packet of biscuits or cheese or whatever may be consoled to know that they are participating in a revolution. Except that the whole episode was a grievous misuse of the word
We mention this because, as the Eastern European dictatorships crumble away, the abuse of political terminology is reaching the scale of a feverish epidemic. In the Weekend Guardian of 16 June, for example, an article on the devastation wrought on the environment by industry in countries like Poland and East Germany was described as "Marxist-Leninist pollution". Leaving aside the fallacious linking of Marx's name with Lenin's — all too common — it is a fact that Marx did not condone the ghastly effects of capitalist industrial development, indeed he devoted a lot of effort to exposing it and to pointing out how it could and must be permanently eradicated.
In its frantic scramble to industrialise, to concentrate human labour power and to expand, developing capitalism has not been concerned about human interests. That is the story behind the slums and their diseased misery, the wrecking of the environment and the pollution of the air, earth and sea. It is the story behind the rush to industrialise in the Eastern bloc countries and the devastation it has brought. Politicians in the West pretend that it is socialism which is responsible for this and which has failed in Eastern Europe. To be charitable, we may assume they say this because they don't understand capitalism and even less socialism. Being rich doesn't save Lord McAlpine and David Sainsbury from being deluded, the working class doesn't have the same excuse, though
Ivan
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