Profit interfering
Sanofi, the pharmaceuticals division of the French Elf Aquitaine oil group, is suspending production of Interferon, the experimental drug used in cancer treatment. The reason they have given for this decision is that sales levels have been disappointing and there has been a steady build-up of stocks. Even the usefulness of trying to develop a treatment or even a cure for cancer cannot escape the law of all production under capitalism — that without the prospect of profit, production must cease.
Last year, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund collected about one million pounds in charity for further research into Interferon. In the same year, the governments of the world spent about the same amount every two minutes on the production of armaments.
Scientists investigating Interferon in different countries have not combined their research data, because the separate corporations who sponsor them each hope to monopolise the enormous profits which might become available if the formula were perfected.
Sales of food, electricity and many other goods and services have been "disappointing” lately, resulting in widespread cutbacks in production. In none of these cases is there a lack of demand, of real need. Last year, thirty million people starved to death. What is lacking is “effective” market demand, that is, needs backed up by money. As usual, the world profit system is failing to meet human needs.
Gay power
The gays of Britain should beware. They are about to be hounded and harassed with an intensity which will make the attention they receive from Chief Constable Anderton of Greater Manchester seem aloof and apathetic.
As W. H. Smith agree to a wholesale distribution of Gay News, an apparently startling — although actually obvious—fact emerges. Gay workers are more than a deviant, oppressed, discriminated-against minority. They are also a market. The new publisher of Gay News has been specific about this. Consulting a recent detailed survey (see what we mean about being hounded?) he puts “. . . the spending power of gay men and women conservatively at about £5,000 million. It's a virtually untapped market”.
Among the first to try to exploit this is a give-away newspaper, Capital Gay. which goes out through gay pubs, clubs and the like. In common with other free papers — which are usually local in their scope — Capital Gay is little more than advertisements garnished with a few news items. Of course, some gays may object to being treated as a separate market, with special appeals to their sexual preferences. They may prefer to be lumped in with all the other workers who trawl their depressed way through the sub-standard goods in their local supermarkets. But being a lucrative market may do more for gays than any amount of protest and propaganda. In a society which produces all its wealth as commodities, the market has the power to overwhelm the most maniacal police chief or other self-appointed guardian of public morals.
Perhaps this will be called progress. Anyone with an awareness of the structure of capitalist society, and of what this does to human beings, will know that discrimination against gays is another aspect of class-based humiliation. Sexual freedom, like all other freedoms, can be secure only in a social order based on common interests.
Asbestos awards
When considerations of human well-being, even of life and death, come directly into conflict with the needs of capital to accumulate profit, the latter generally wins. There are countless examples to demonstrate this. When such conflicts occur, the companies involved are curiously adept at evading the implications.
Two hundred and fifty insulation workers in Illinois are reported by doctors to have died or become seriously ill after working with brown asbestos, amosite, supplied by North American Asbestos. An American court found against the British parent company, Cape Industries, for having knowingly supplied an extremely dangerous substance without warning, and fined them for £32 million damages.
Cape will not pay this money, since the award is not enforceable in Britain, where they face many other such charges, having been named in 900 cases. In the American case, however, they took more elaborate precautions than ever to avoid having to pay money out of the profits made from those workers' deaths.
Cape’s parent company. Charter Consolidated, is the London associate of the Anglo-American Corporation of. South Africa, with mining interests in America. In January 1978, after paying out one million dollars in an asbestos case in Texas, Cape liquidated its North American Asbestos Corporation, which had also supplied the amosite used by the workers who died in Illinois.
But Cape continued to own shares in the Liechtenstein-based Associated Mineral Corporation, which supplied asbestos to Continental Products, who operated from the same Chicago address which had been used by the North American Asbestos Corporation. (Guardian, 6 July 1982; World in Action, Granada TV, 5 July 1982.)
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