Bad news
After all the efforts of Oxfam, Bob Geldof and the rest, nobody now needs to be told about the terrible effects of drought on human communities. Without rain crops do not grow; cultivated land becomes a barren desert and people starve to death by the thousand. To enterprises like Band Aid and Comic Relief, these are natural tragedies — acts of God, as evasive insurance companies like to say. The inference of this is clear: drought happens outside of human control and we are powerless to do much more about it than put money into collecting boxes.
But questions need to be asked: about why a world which is capable of feeding its population should periodically watch millions of them die because they don't have enough to eat; about why, as famine rages in one part of the world, in other parts food is left to rot and farmers are paid not to produce the life-giving stuff
The answers to these questions — and to some others have been revealed by recent events in America, where there has been a severe drought. Many agricultural areas have been desperate for rain as soaring temperatures turned the soil into blackened powder, crops withered and animals could not breed. But while the American farmers were getting desperate, the people who make money out of selling their produce were in rather better shape. Shortage means rising prices, which in June reached record levels. So a nice profit could he made from buying farm produce and, as the drought continued to affect production, watching the selling price rise with the temperature.
This comfortable situation was exposed in all its fragility in July, when the weather forecasters suddenly began to talk about the approaching end of the drought. The reaction of the commodity dealers was decidedly not relief; they panicked at the thought of better crops and what this would do to their profits In their frantic efforts to unload what they had bought they pushed prices down further, by record amounts.
Anyone whose heart aches at the plight of these brokers in human needs may take comfort from the fact that the government has a price policy, which came quickly to the rescue like the US cavalry. Prices were stopped from falling too far and. in any case, it did not rain as much as the farmers had hoped and the dealers had feared.
This sordid episode illustrates that food is produced, not to feed people but to be sold with the object of profit. That is why farmers suffer in a natural disaster while the people who market their produce benefit. It is also why masses of people starve when there is absolutely no reason for them to do so. The activities of Oxfam, Geldof and the rest obscure this fact, but until we have a society based on satisfying human needs it will continue to bedevil their well-meant efforts It will not, like the drought-stricken soil, blow away.
Blue Blood
If, as the Democrats say, George Bush is a wimp he can at least claim to be a royal wimp — of which, as we know, there is already no shortage. No less an expert in irrelevance than the senior genealogist for Burke's Peerage has traced a Bush connection to every European monarch (not that there are many of them left now) As far as the British royals go. Bush is a 13th cousin twice removed to the Queen, a 13th cousin once removed to the Queen Mother and he is linked to, among others, the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York
It might be thought that the most surprising thing about this is that there are so many people prepared to spend so much time in research into such meaningless trivia. Does it matter if the ruling class can be shown to be one vast, international hot-bed of incestuousness? But the story did provide a little publicity for Burke's, which does not enjoy a readership to compare with Mills and Boon. It also contributed to the mystique of ruling class origins, which asserts that they hold their superior position through some process other than the exploitation of the majority of people.
The assumption is that "royal blood" is also noble blood — that being in the aristocracy proper presupposes an especially gallant personality. This romantic nonsense is not supported by history, which reveals the roots of the British nobility in mediaeval episodes of banditry and bloodshed. True to this type, another of the Bush relations is Lord Lucan, long absent from this country since the police announced that they would like him to help in their enquiries into the murder of his children's nanny.
It will not be known for a while whether all this will win or lose votes for Bush; his opponent. Michael Dukakis, makes much of his humble, plebeian origins. American workers. much like those in other countries, tend to vote on issues other than the candidates ancestors, which does not mean that they concern themselves with anything more relevant or pressing. They will give their support to the man who in their opinion will be less inept in grappling with the problems of American capitalism
Wimpish Bush or Workaholic Dukakis is no real choice. Come November, it will be equally futile to vote for or against royal connections.
Blow out
As the smoke cleared from the wreck of Piper Alpha a number of sordid but instructive facts began to emerge. There has been no lack of experts to tell us that the design of the rig was defective. It is fair to ask what the experts were doing when the rig was being designed and built. At that time the North Sea oil boom was just getting under way; it was no time to delay things with footling doubts and questions about safety. It was all excitement then; there was going to be a British oil field, to rival the Middle East. In the rush to get the rigs built and into position, a little detail like placing the workers' living quarters over a potential bomb was either hardly noticed or noticed and ignored.
In those heady days we were sold that North Sea oil and gas was a massive break through the long awaited entry into a trade which would bring boundless prosperity to us all (there was little mention of what it would do for people like Armand Hammer). Workers on the rigs were glamorised into an elite, agents of a modem technology which could triumph over the elements, earning big money in the storms far out in the cruel sea so that we could benefit.
It was a similar story at BP's terminal at Sullom Voe, which was designed to handle half the British output from the North Sen but which, after only six years of full operation, has serious problems of corrosion. At least one technician at the plant says that these are due to the pressures of time and profit which were being applied as the terminal was built.
Piper Alpha has been described as an accident but it is hardly correct to use this word in a case where the risks should have been so clearly foreseeable but were so deliberately built into the design to increase the rig's chances of profitability. That this is accepted now — if tacitly — is shown by the sordid process of arguing for compensation, which has attracted a whole clutch of lawyers including some from America, where they are accustomed to what is called ambulance-chasing after a disaster. When a worker is killed their family often suffers the added burden of financial stress, and it is right that they should try to ease it by claiming compensation from the employers. What should sicken every worker is to see how this exposes their standing in capitalist society. The compensation which each family receives will be adjusted — perhaps by a court — according to what is judged to have been the dead worker's earning capacity. The higher paid their job, the longer their expected working life, the higher the compensation.
Whatever our job — however tedious or glamorous tt may be — our status as wage slaves, living through the sale of our working ability, reduces us to factors in the investment process. We represent a type of capital, to be expended to produce profit and to contribute to the accumulation of yet more capital by our employers We are living beings but before that we are items on a balance sheet.
Blogger's Note:
The August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a standalone article on the Piper Alpha disaster.
No comments:
Post a Comment