Passing Show: Details (1962)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Details

The system which exists today in Russia is clearly capitalism. All the classic features of capitalism are there — commodity production, wage-labour, employment (which couldn't exist without employers and employed), currency, the coercive forces of the state, and so on. Naturally, the historical background of the development of capitalism in Russia, and the immediate circumstances in which capitalism came into being there, meant that some minor details of capitalism in Russia differ from details in those countries where capitalism had a longer and slower development. In particular, the very speed with which the old system collapsed, and the new one was introduced, demanded that the state itself, the central committee of the capitalist class, should play a much larger part in the establishment of the new order than it had done in western Europe and North America. Of course, since that time state capitalism has been more and more introduced into the older-established capitalist states; but it has not yet, and one does not know if it ever will, come to play such a part in Western capitalism as it does in the capitalist systems established in Russia, China, India, the African states, and so on.

Proposals

However, even in these comparatively minor details, there is coming to be less and less difference between Russian and Western capitalism. Not only are state planning and control playing a larger part in western capitalism; other changes are being mooted in Russia itself. As The Times said on October 3rd, “Proposals are at present under discussion in Russia to link the remuneration of workers to the profits made by their enterprises in relation to the investments made in them.” Since these and other proposals have aroused controversy, Pravda has recently printed what it calls "a previously unpublished version of a document dictated by Lenin in 1918.”

Raising labour productivity

“Lenin argued that political victory over the capitalists had been won and the struggle was passing to the economic sphere. Those who had formerly sought to sabotage the Bolshevik cause were now (in 1918) offering their services to the new state. It was of the utmost importance to take advantage of these offers and harness to the communist cause the best methods and systems of capitalism. “He proposed that highly paid experts be hired from the United States and elsewhere as consultants and managers. Bourgeois staff and also their methods of labour organization could be used if they helped to raise production. The old world had created systems of labour organization which were diabolical methods for exploiting the worker. At the same time these systems are ‘the last word in the scientific organization of production' and should be copied in the Soviet Union where they would lose their noxious character.

“An example was the system of Mr. Mr. F. W. Taylor, the American engineer who perfected “scientific management”—on which present day time-and-motion studies and “work study” are to a large extent based. “We must apply Taylor’s system and American scientific methods of raising labour productivity throughout Russia,” Lenin wrote, for under Soviet conditions it would lead to a shortening of working hours and an improvement in conditions of work.” The Times 3/10/62

Latest methods

All Lenin was calling for was what could have been expected from any leader of a new capitalist revolution: the application of the latest and best methods (best, that is, from the capitalists’ point of view) which had been evolved in the older capitalist states. As might have been foreseen, when Lenin attempted to square all this with his own statements that the Bolsheviks were really introducing Socialism in Russia, common sense was thrown overboard. Pravda even quotes him as saying that “Socialism has to be learnt to a great extent from the leaders of the trusts, Socialism has to be learnt from the major organizers of capitalism.”

As to that, one can only say that all you can learn from the major organizers of capitalism is how to organize capitalism; and all you can learn from the leaders of trusts is how to lead trusts.

These statements, quoted by Pravda from the greatest figure of the Russian revolution, must surely go far to convince anyone who is still open to reason that Russia is capitalist.

Contrast

On the back of The Times recently there were some photographs of scenes in Peru, and the text beside them read “Peru is a land of contrast and anomaly. It is a rich country where there are also austerity and poverty.”

No wonder there is a saying that the onlooker sees most of the game. The writer of the text saw clearly the social position in Peru. Perhaps if he lived in Peru, he would see just as clearly the “contrast and anomaly,” the riches and poverty side by side, which exist in Britain.

Hard work

Not long ago there was an advert in the daily press from a man who claimed he had amassed £300,000 “through hard work.” As it stands, no one could take exception to the statement. It would be impossible for anyone to amass three hundred thousand pounds without a great deal of hard work.

In fact, only one question remains unanswered.

Whose hard work was it?

Alwyn Edgar

An Unlikely Story (2013)

A Short Story from the August 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the date was 200 R. W. – that is to say, 200 years since the human race had decided to establish a Rational World – it was announced that a lecture was to be given at the local meeting hall. The lecture was to be about the old society, the society that had been abolished when the revolution took place.

‘I know’, the lecturer began, ‘that when our new society was fully in operation, the old way of doing things seemed so indefensible that many of its details were quickly forgotten.’ However, he added, he had been doing much research, and now wished to describe the old society. The lecturer was quite deaf, and the noise he heard from time to time from his audience he took to be sounds of agreement. When he had finished, the chairman threw the meeting open. The first speaker from the floor politely thanked the speaker for coming to share his findings, but the rest of what he said was not so respectful.

‘I have to say’, he went on, ‘that I honestly couldn’t accept what the lecturer has told us tonight.  He claims that in the old days, when capitalism was rampant, society was divided basically into two classes. One class, much the smaller, owned everything worth owning – all the factories, the mines, the offices, the transport – everything: and they lived very comfortable, or even luxurious, lives, on the rent, interest and profit they gained from the work of the rest of the population. And all the work they (a few of them) did, if you could call it work, was to make sure the rest of the population worked for them. Everyone else had to spend their lives working for the benefit of this small owning class; and their returns from all their hard labour were very much smaller, and most of them spent their lives worrying about money, one way or another. Now I ask you – is that at all likely?  I mean, they were human beings then, just like we are human beings now.  How could they have put up with such a society?  I know they were deluged with propaganda practically from the time they were born – the newspapers, the radio, the television, the pulpits, the books – virtually all of them hammered home the idea that this was the only way humans could organize themselves, that anything else which might be suggested was just an impossible dream. I know all that.  But how could almost the entire human race accept such a system?  Not only was the structure of things theoretically unjust, in that the people who did all the work got a miserably small reward, just enough to keep them alive, and mostly in just sufficient health to enable them to spend their entire working lives labouring for the benefit of other people – I say, the system was not only theoretically unjust, but unjust in practice, in everyday reality, so that the great majority of people could see that they were being short-changed every day of their lives.  Now is it likely that human beings, people just like us, would calmly and patiently accept such rank injustice?’

He paused. ‘I suppose that if this state of affairs, if this monstrously unfair division of the good things of life between those who did not work but consumed in abundance on the one hand, and those who did all the work but consumed very little, on the other, was in some way hushed up, kept secret so far as that was possible – perhaps you could say that the secrecy might go some way to explaining why this society was accepted – not only by the small class of owners, but equally by the large class of workers. But there was no secrecy, no attempt at keeping this totally inequitable system under wraps. As the workers went each day to their work on their crowded buses or trains, they could, and did, read graphic descriptions in each day’s paper about the glorious lives lived by their betters. The working people went back every night to the little boxes they called homes, reading the evening papers with their full details of the vast mansions owned by the rich – many of them indeed, owning two or three or more of these palatial establishments in the very best parts of town, or in the country, surrounded by many acres of parks. Is it likely that anyone could accept such a state of things without trying immediately to overthrow it?  And yet the lecturer has tried to persuade us that the people of the so-called democracies voted at each election for politicians who promised them more of the same – while in other countries, ruled by dictators, people accepted that they were not even allowed to vote freely for the system that kept them in subjection. I just can’t swallow the stories told by this evening’s lecturer.’

The lecturer stood to reply.  ‘I agree that it’s all very, very unlikely, and yet it happened. People have often been unable to accept the obvious facts of existence.  When the great astronomer Galileo claimed that the earth moved round the sun, he was hauled in front of the Inquisition. Everyone knew that the earth stood still, while the sun, moon and stars moved round it, because the Bible said so in about five different places. Galileo was forced to recant, but he is supposed to have said afterwards, ‘Eppur si muove’ – ‘for all that, it does move’. And, believe it or not, just as nearly everybody then knew that the earth didn’t move, people before the revolution did support the old system – however unlikely it seems to us now. Don’t forget, our present system shows that ultimately people do accept the world as it is – just as even the religious people finally had to accept that the world does move.’

Alwyn Edgar

Passing Show: Democracy (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

We make no apology for returning to the subject of Sir Thomas Moore, the Conservative M.P. for Ayr Burghs. Sir Thomas is the man who advocates a return to flogging and more frequent hanging as the answer to our troubles. But he only supports these punishments in cases of petty violence. Where a dictator is able to carry out a long and widespread campaign of violence, then Sir Thomas (provided he agrees with the tyrant’s brand of politics) is all for it. In the early days of Hitler's regime he was an outspoken supporter of German Nazism; and he is still a loyal champion of Spanish Fascism. On June 7th he wrote to The Times defending General Franco's regime, on the grounds that he imposed "law and order" on the country when, in the thirties, Spain was threatened with "communism on the march to impose its usual stranglehold on freedom”.

Only a week earlier, on May 31st, there had been the news of the sentencing of thirty-two agricultural workers to terms of up to 15 years' imprisonment by a Madrid military court, on the charge of "spreading communist propaganda" (a blanket term which, in Spain, covers any criticism of the regime). This is only the latest of a long series of trials of political opponents which Franco's courts have held since he—having shown himself more successful at violence and killing than his opponents—came to power in the Civil War. These thirty-two farm workers, and the thousands of others in Franco's political jails, would no doubt be interested to learn of Sir Thomas’s contention that Franco seized power in order to forestall an attempt to put a "stranglehold on freedom" in Spain. To defend Franco on these grounds is like giving a medal to a man who saves a child from drowning, only to stab it to death immediately afterwards.

Democracy

But, of course, political freedom need not be Sir Thomas's concern. If the Communists were in power in Spain, they would probably (not necessarily, of of course, as Yugoslavia shows) ally themselves with Russia—which is now the main overseas enemy of the British ruling class. Franco and his Fascists, on the other hand, would come in with the British ruling class in any war against Russia. So Sir Thomas supports Franco, and Mr. Butler goes to Spain as Franco's guest, saying it is a shame that Franco Spain has been left out of things for so long. What do they care for the fact that the Spanish people are deprived of democratic freedoms? Democracy is a useful catchword in time of war: but if the interests of the ruling class demand it, democracy is shrugged off without a second thought.

Borgwards

Just as state control was applied here to rescue the coal and rail shareholders from the complete loss of their investments, so nationalisation—or municipalisation—is used for the same purpose in other countries. A news item from Germany in The Times (7-6-61) ran:

  Dr. Johannes Sender, who took over the direction of the Borgward car manufacturing company in February, said today that the firm would have to cut its staff by another 2,500 people. In March the board empowered the management to dismiss up to 2,500 workers. Borgwards was taken over by the Bremen municipal authorities earlier this year after it ran into financial difficulties.

The local Social Democrats would find the sacked five thousand workers a troublesome audience, if like the Labour Party here, they tried to persuade them that municipatisation was really for their benefit.

Raw material

An advert aimed at capitalists has recently been appearing in the more expensive newspapers. It tries to persuade industrial concerns to move to Durham, or at least to open new works there. Headed “All the workers you need in County Durham," it goes on “good hard workers, ready and willing to learn new skills".  It gives a picture of a crowd of them.

This offering of human beings as promising raw material to employers bent on the extraction of surplus value is surely degrading both to the men themselves and to those who planned and those who read the advertisement. One might advertise cart-horses in much the same way. One of the many advantages of Socialism is that human beings will be considered as human beings, not simply as so much factory-fodder.

Expense accounts

The next time you read figures showing the gross inequality of incomes— after tax—in this country, the next time you hear of the handful who get £120 and £140 per week after tax, compared with the millions who get less than £20 and the millions more who even get less than £10, remember that this is by no means the whole story. The directors' fees, the share dividends are only part of the real income of the owning class Besides the actual money, which is taxed, there are the large allowances on the expense accounts, which are untaxed. So excessive have some of these junketings on expense accounts become in America that the American Treasury investigated the position, and has now released some evidence showing what has been happening. “Safaris in Kenya, lavish living in Las Vegas and in the Caribbean and the maintenance of yachts have all been tax deductible " (The Times 8-5-61). An insurance man was allowed 97,500 dollars for “personal expenses ”. The president of a dairy went on a six-month safari, and took his wife with him: he was allowed $16,443. A corporation which owned luxurious facilities on a sub-tropical island, including its own fishing cruiser, and aircraft to take its executives and their guests down there, was allowed $375,000. A supply firm had its own yacht, ranch and hunting lodges, and was given a tax-allowance of £473,140 to cover its expenditure on them and on night club entertainment. If we can be sure of anything, it is that the ordinary workers in these firms never saw these sub-tropical islands, or the hunting lodges. These devices are simply ways in which owners of firms obtain the means of luxurious living without having to reveal too enormous personal incomes. For to confess their real incomes (apart from the extra tax) would show too clearly to the workers the vast gap which separates the upper from the lower class.

Alwyn Edgar

The Passing Show: Misrepresentation (1959)

The Passing Show Column from the March 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Misrepresentation

Recently Lord Birdwood protested in the House of Lords about “misrepresentations of conditions in Britain which, he said, had followed an interchange of journalists with Czechoslovakia last year ” (Manchester Guardian, 11 / 2/59). One Czech newspaper, said Lord Birdwood, “carried a report of a bearded beggar, covered by a tarpaulin and with his feet in a paper sack, who lay asleep in Hyde Park ‘not far from glittering Piccadilly.’ This was intended to indicate that Britain could not maintain work and homes for all its citizens.”

False information

Lord Home replied for the Government and defended the interchange. We had to accept, he said, “that there was a risk that journalists in Communist countries might toe the party line and produce the kind of misrepresentation of which Lord Birdwood had given examples.” There is no doubt, he lamented, “that from time to time we will find people coming here from other countries and reporting false information.”

The Czech newspapers, of course, would be very glad to tell their readers how badly off the British people were, in order to take their minds off the conditions which they have to endure under Czech capitalism. But to return to Lord Birdwood’s protest about misrepresentation.

Mutual admiration society

It is not recorded that any of the other peers expressed surprise at this Birdwood-Home duet. Augustine Birrell once said that the House of Lords represent nobody but themselves, and they enjoy the full confidence of their constituents. On this kind of performance, they certainly have little claim to the confidence of anyone else. For on the very same day as Lords Birdwood and Home were being indignant about foreign journalists suggesting that “Britain could not maintain work for its citizens,” in the House of Commons (whose members have to be elected, and therefore must maintain some kind of contact with the real world), the Minister of Labour was announcing that six hundred and twenty thousand of the citizens of Britain were unemployed. This means that six hundred and twenty thousand workers in this country are being denied by capitalism the chance to be of use to society, that hundreds of thousands of families are living on the dole and going short perhaps of those very things which the father of the family is not allowed to make because no one will get a profit out of it. Presumably Lord Birdwood hasn't heard about these 620,000 unemployed now drawing the dole. None of them, it is safe to say, belong to the House of Lords; nor do Lords Birdwood and Home have to remember their votes at the General Election—however baseless their statements are, the noble lords are in the happy position of knowing that at the General Election they will be returned to Parliament without the vulgar necessity of being voted for.

Housing

And what about the other part of the complaint? Surely that is justified? For the Tories make a great boast of their treatment of the housing situation. Since they took office each responsible Minister had been beating his chest about his successes in housing the people: foundation-stones have been laid, ceremonial openings performed, and our ears filled with torrents of speeches about how lucky the workers are to be having so much done for them.

And the facts? For BBC television, Robert Reid investigated the housing situation in Glasgow seven years ago, when the Conservatives had just been returned to power. There were then 100,000 applicants on the town’s housing list. Last month he returned to Glasgow to estimate progress. The number now on the housing list? 126.000.

But despite these facts, it is “misrepresentation” and “false information” according to Lords Birdwood and Home—to say that Britain cannot maintain work and homes for her people.

How comforting it must be not to know the facts of life under our social system! How fine to be able to assume that because you have a home and a solid income, everyone else has too! In short, how lovely to be a Lord!

The pot speaks up

You don’t have to be a baron to know nothing about what goes on. You can be quite ignorant even if you’re only a knight.

Sir Hugh Foot, Governor of Cyprus, commenting the other day on the Eoka truce, said: “ There will be no bargaining with violence” (Manchester Guardian, 14/1/59). No bargaining with violence! If there was no bargaining with violence, there would be no politics at all. For violence—that is war and armed conflict—is only the “continuation of politics by other means,” as Clausewitz put it. Sir Hugh may have forgotten, but the country on whose behalf he rules over Cyprus not only doesn’t condemn violence as a means of solving capitalism’s problems —it has actually engaged in two colossally destructive wars on a world-wide scale within the last half-century, and is now arming so that it will not be left out if a third one begins. Sir Hugh raised no voice against the violence used by Britain in the second world war, which included dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a joint death roll admitted by the Allies to be at least 120,000. Sir Hugh reserves his condemnation of violence for the agents of the would-be Cypriot ruling class, when they use the same methods—killing and destroying—which all the capitalist powers have used to further their ends in every war they have ever engaged in. This does not justify Eoka: but a British Governor can no more complain about the violence of others than one iceberg can complain how chilly the other icebergs are.

When only the best will do

Many of the goods which crowd the shop-windows are only shoddy stuff, botched-up to sell at the cheapest price and yield the highest profit. But a Johannesburg reader sends me a cutting revealing that at least one article designed for the workers’ consumption is made to the highest specifications. The item was in the Johannesburg Star (30/12/58):-

  "Rubber batons, designed and made in the Union, will gradually replace wooden batons in the police.
   "An order for 1,000 rubber batons, which have been approved by the Bureau of Standards, has been placed with a large rubber concern."

So any unemployed South African worker, tenderly feeling his head after the dispersal of demonstrations, can comfort himself by reflecting that the lump upon it has been raised by a precision-made instrument of the first quality, and that the throb in his temples carries with it the full approval of the Bureau of Standards.

Alwyn Edgar.

The Passing Show: Time and Money (1958)

The Passing Show Column from the December 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time and Money
Capitalism comes to different countries in different forms. The more recently a country has become Capitalist, the more efficient—from the point of view of the Capitalists—its system is likely to be: for it can draw on the experience of the rest of the Capitalist world.

Capitalism’s first need is for plenty of workers. One of the most important steps in any Capitalist revolution is to drive many of the peasants into the towns, where they can form the new urban proletariat. If this is done too quickly, agricultural production will suffer; if too slowly, industrial production will be held up. Again, even in peace time each Capitalist state must maintain a standing army, to preserve internal "order” and to deter and to threaten other states. If this army is too small, other countries are not sufficiently impressed; if it is too big, it means that some men are kept in idleness when they could be working in factories or on farms for the profit of the Capitalists.

As the Capitalists see it, one drawback of their system is that these categories—town-worker, farm-worker, soldier—are too rigid. It takes prolonged economic discomfort before a town-worker will become a farm-worker, or vice versa; if only because it usually means a man and his family leaving the area they know and moving away to another district altogether. And when in war-time the army has to be rapidly expanded, it takes time and money to set up the large organisations necessary to conscript' and train workers as soldiers.


Latest Model—Convertible
But China, which has been setting up its state Capitalist system only in the last ten years has been able to draw on the experience of British, American and Russian Capitalism, and has apparently been able to avoid some of the shortcomings of earlier Capitalist systems—shortcomings, that is, in the estimation of the ruling class. For example, over-rigid classification seems to have been avoided. According to press reports (e.g. The Observer, 9th November, 1958), the unit in the new Chinese Capitalism is not the factory or the farm, but the commune, the average size of which is “about 8.000 households”. The great advantage of these, to Mao Tse-Tung and his fellow-rulers, is that the Chinese worker is not allowed to settle down as one thing or the other; instead, he is organised in a thousands-strong labour corps, and then he and the rest are used as “workers peasants or soldiers, according to actual needs.” If this scheme succeeds it will make the American and Russian boss green with envy.

The Chinese have gone further. Communal mess halls are set up to feed the workers, and kindergartens to take care of their children: and thus the women of the commune too are “set free”—to join the labour corps. Shantung Province chums that it has "liberated six million women for productive work.” The commune owns all the land, the peasants having been compelled to hand over their individual plots to it. It runs agriculture within its boundaries on the lines of a great state farm. It also runs schools and broadcasting stations, collects the taxes—and organises the militia. But it does even more. In the last year or two thousands upon thousands of small factories have been set up throughout China: these, too, are run by the commune. It is "industrialisation without towns.” By these means the Chinese ruling class hopes to avoid the waste of the years of starving out the peasants, and the diversion of resources to build great new towns, which slowed up the British and the Russian Capitalist revolutions. The commune has replaced the town or the factory as the unit of industry, the village or the farm as the unit of agriculture, and the regiment as the unit of the reserve army. If everything which is reported is true, China’s system may turn out to be the most profitable Capitalist system we have yet seen.


Back to the alphabet
But why is this system mistaken for Socialism or Communism? Both those who support China's rulers—the Communist Party—and the majority of those who oppose them, call China a “Communist” country. The Observer article mentioned above had a sub-title "A New Communism.” This is to get the very ABC of economics wrong. A more efficient form of Capitalism does not become Communism. All the well-known features urban (and rural) proletariat, owning neither the tools they work with nor the things they produce; a money-system of exchange, which is pointless except to deprive the workers of the full value of their produce; and a resulting surplus value, which goes to support the ruling class, for whose benefit the whole system is run.


Heredity
Another book has been published recently about the Churchills, from the Duke of Marlborough and his forebears down to Sir Winston. The idea behind it is a common one: that social characteristics, such as the quality of “leadership,” are passed down from parents to their offspring. No one doubts that physical characteristics. such as the colour of eyes and hair, are passed on to children in all animals, including human beings. But that social characteristics can be passed on seems a lot more doubtful, to say the least of it. In any case, full investigations are seldom made. To trace Sir Winston Churchill’s descent from the Duke of Marlborough, and to conclude that Sir Winston inherited some of the qualities of the Duke, is often done. But Sir Winston is in the eighth generation from the Duke, which means that he had two hundred and fifty-six ancestors in the Duke's generation, all of whom, according to this theory, presumably contributed as much to Sir Winston's character as the Duke of Marlborough did. And of these two hundred and fifty-six, sixteen were full-blooded Iroquois Indians. (Sir Winston Churchill’s mother had one Iroquois great grandparent). So if we accept the theory, whatever Sir Winston got from the Duke of Marlborough, he must have got sixteen times as much from the Iroquois. But whoever wrote a book about that?

The velvet glove

As a postscript to the events at Famagusta last October (when four lives were lost and two hundred and fifty people were injured in the British “search for suspects” after a woman was found murdered) a remark of Brigadier Terence Clarke, Tory M.P. for Portsmouth West, is not without interest. The Brigadier says (Reynolds News, 9th November, 1958): “We’ve had too much of the velvet glove : what we want is a bit of the mailed fist”

If four deaths and 250 injuries appear to the Brigadier to be too much like the “velvet glove,” one wonders what scale of casualties among the civilian population would be produced by his “mailed fist”

Laugh of the year

Sir Anthony Eden is reported to be among the possible candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize for 1958 (Sunday Express, 9th November, 1958). This Peace Prize award is always ridiculous; how can it be anything else, when it is inevitably presented to someone who supports the present system of society, which leads to wars as surely as old bread goes mouldy? But the consideration of this man, whose last service to peace was to commit aggression against Egypt on the grounds that Israel had already attacked her, makes the whole thing even more of a farce.

Scandal

Those who live on the exploitation of the workers have of late years become much more coy. Once no gentleman would admit to an occupation; now the wealthy often conceal their idleness by becoming directors of companies. Nevertheless, members of the upper class themselves sometimes let slip in unguarded moments just how much work is attached to being a director.

One such admission was recorded on October 12th in the Sunday Express, which in its hot pursuit of scandal often allows the rest of us illuminating insights into the lives of the rich. Some time ago a “Kentish squire” disappeared from his home, at the same time as a riding mistress nearby disappeared from hers. The Sunday Express had to give its readers a long report on the matter, with all the details, of course: no doubt in fulfilment of the high moral duty of the newspapers to the public, about which they so often tell us. But what concerns us is the fact that the squire was a director of an estate company. If the holding of a directorship fools the world at large, it doesn’t seem to have fooled his wife. Her husband, she said, “ hasn’t worked for twenty years."

We all have our worries

On the topic of directors, an interesting little booklet has appeared recently. It is entitled “Health Problems of Directors,’’ and it is published by the Institute of Directors. Among the dangers and causes of ill-health that these gallant men have to contend with are mentioned: (1) Eating too much; (2) Drinking too much; (3) The blows to. a director’s self-esteem which come from being theoretically in charge of a concern about which his subordinates know a lot more than he does. The man at the factory bench or clerking in the office seldom realises the risks run by his boss. The Institute of Directors, of course, might lengthen its list. For any new edition of this stimulating little work may we mention these further hazards of a director’s life: (1) Falling off his horse when playing polo; (2) Barking his shin when his chauffeur is helping him from his Bentley; (3) Spraining his wrist while tucking into the turtle soup at official banquets.

Alwyn Edgar

Passing Comments: Aggression (1952)

The Passing Comments Column from the March 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Aggression
While all capitalist powers are by their nature expansionist, this tendency is seen more obviously in the behaviour of those who came latest to the game of international grabbing; and many of these new powers are grouped together at present under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Thus one of the most telling weapons in the propaganda armoury of the Western Powers is that of “resistance to aggression." But, of course, neither bloc is unimpeachable on this count, and perhaps we should not hear quite so much about "defence against aggression” from the NATO powers if they were not in the majority in the United Nations. This majority enables the United States to get its own views as to what is and is not aggression endorsed by the United Nations. Endorsement of the American view is made all the more easy by the fact that "aggression” has never been legally defined: indeed, those who talk most loudly about resisting aggression are the most reluctant to define exactly what it is they wish to resist. It is as if there were no laws laying down what constitute burglary, merely a court which decided each time a dispute came up whether or not a burglary had been committed, and if it had been which party to the dispute was the burglar. This lack of definition is very useful to the NATO powers, for if aggression were defined it would be very difficult to explain why such open acts of aggression as that of India against Hyderabad were tacitly condoned.


Entirely justified
The Soviet Union has now taken the question up again in the legal committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris, and has submitted a long list of acts which in its opinion should be proclaimed aggressions by the United Nations. The Western Powers have of course voted against this move. The reasons for their doing so were given in The Times of January 19th with a frankness which must have been embarrassing to them. The Times said openly that a definition of aggression would mean that many acts of the Anglo-American powers would under such a definition be ruled as aggressive—

  “In fact, a detailed list of definitions would he endless and would certainly prejudge, as aggressive, many acts which when the time came could be entirely justified.... During the present tension in the world no power wishes to be committed to military action on the bask of arbitrary rules attempting to govern every eventuality.”

Burma
The wisdom of this stand from the point of view of the Western Powers was again demonstrated soon afterwards. On January 28th the American, British and French delegates on the political committee of UNO were making the usual threatening speeches about “resistance to Communist aggression” in S.E. Asia, when the Burmese delegate got up and drew the attention of the meeting to the fact that an army of Chinese Nationalist troops under General Li-Mi had invaded the Kengtung province of Burma after having been thrown out of China by Mao Tse-Tung’s forces. The Burmese army had given battle to these Chinese Nationalists, but had been unable to defeat them decisively. Two days later, in the plenary Assembly, the Burmese delegate again spoke of Kuomintang aggression, and pointed out the connection between the reluctance of the Western Powers to define aggression and their equal reluctance to act when the aggressor was one of their allies. He said:

  “Doubts were being expressed in some American quarters about the presence of any Chinese troops, in spite of confirmation by the United States embassy in Rangoon that the Formosan Government had been asked for its co-operation in getting them out. It could be seen from this example that, even when an act of aggression had taken place, people were disinclined to accept undenied facts. The Nationalist troops would get out fast enough if those states which had been against defining aggression but had favoured collective measures in the United Nations told the aggressor, accepted by many 'under another name.’ that all aid and recognition would be annulled unless the 'invaders’ were immediately withdrawn." (Times, 1-2-52.)

Home and away
It is not only those promises and pledges relating to home affairs which the Conservatives have had to discard since the election. The promises made by the Tories in international politics have also been thrown overboard. One of the main features of many Tory election speeches was a promise that if Churchill were returned to power Britain would recover her freedom and independence in world affairs, and would resume her natural position of leadership. The unspoken idea behind such promises is that a nation owes its position in the world not to its economic resources and military power, but to the “great men” which lead it. The worth of the idea can be seen in the rapidity with which the pledge has been abandoned. It was not long before the election that Churchill protested vigorously in the House of Commons against the appointment of an American admiral as Commander-in-Chief of the naval forces of the Western Powers in the Atlantic. But the realities of power—60 per cent. of the naval forces in the Atlantic are American and only 30 per cent. British —have now forced Churchill to agree to just that. In extenuation the Conservatives say that Churchill has obtained a million tons of American steel but has had to give up equally valuable tin and tungsten in return, besides paying the Americans double the present British price for their steel.


Second fiddle
The subsidiary position of British capitalism can also be seen in the attitude of America in those parts of the world where the British Empire is crumbling, and where Britain is being pushed out of strategically and economically valuable areas. In Persia, America stood by when the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. was given its marching orders by the Persians, and the American-led World Bank is now trying to arrange terms on which the Persian capitalists themselves can carry on the production of oil. In Egypt, America watches from the sidelines. On January 29th a State Department spokesman said that America had no intention of mediating between Egypt and Britain. “The Government was not at present contemplating any moves and it had advanced no proposals” (Times, 30-1-52). A recent report made by the Senate foreign relations committee to the Senate was even more definite:

  “The report also contains a specific assurance to the Senate from Mr. Acheson, the Secretary of State, that an attack on British forces in Egypt would not bring the North Atlantic Treaty into operation." (Times, 23-1-52).

Mr. Acheson here appears to have abandoned even the theory that aggression is only aggression when it is aimed against members of the N.A.T.O. alliance; now it seems that only attacks made on the areas where the United States has a direct influence are to be considered as aggressions. Clearly, as far as America is concerned. British capitalism’s chestnuts are to remain in the fire.


Fall in and follow—America
When Mr. Churchill addressed the American Congress on January 17th, he said plaintively “it would enormously aid us in our task if even token forces of other partners in the Four-Power proposal were stationed in the Canal Zone.” But even though, as the Times put it, such forces would be “considerably smaller than the token forces which they (the Americans) always talk of other United Nations countries having in Korea,” Congress has not even considered the idea. Later in the same speech Mr. Churchill reassured the Congress that there was no danger of British insubordination by saying “we must persevere in the tasks to which, under United States leadership, we have solemnly bound ourselves” He continued:

  “Britain and the United States were working together in the same high cause. Bismarck once said that the supreme fact of the nineteenth century was that Britain and the United States spoke the same language. 'Let us make sure,' said Mr. Churchill, 'that the supreme fact of the twentieth century is that they tread the same path.’ ” (Times, 18-1-52).

The concessions Mr. Churchill has already made, and the tone he took in this speech, make it certain that he realises how this will be done; by British capitalism following in America’s footsteps, not the other way round.


Figures
On January 20th the Sunday Express proposed that there should be a “two-tier meat system,” under which every citizen would have a small ration at a low price, plus the opportunity to buy more at world prices.

  "Socialists will argue that the mass of the nation cannot afford to pay the world price for meat. That is not true. Every family in Britain spends, on average, £1 a week on tobacco. As a nation we spend per head on drink, tobacco and gambling an average of 18s. I0d. a week. If meat were available, most sensible people would soon cut some of that spending and buy meat instead."

Here the Sunday Express employs, one can only assume deliberately, one of the oldest fallacies in numbers—the “average” fallacy—in order to put across a political point. “The average family,” we are told, “spends £1 a week on tobacco.” And “per head” we spend “on average” 18s. 10d. per week on drink, tobacco and gambling. If the Sunday Express's average citizen spends 18s. 10d. a week on these things, no doubt the Sunday Express's “average family” of 4 will spend £3 15s. 4d. per week on them. Perhaps the Sunday Express leader-writer doesn’t see his own fallacy. At any rate, if he is not being intentionally obtuse, he must be astoundingly ignorant of the living conditions among that great mass of the population of Britain which still lives on incomes of under £10 a week—some on incomes a good deal under it—if he can assume that “on average” a family of 4 will spend £3 15s. a week on smoking, drinking and gambling. The fallacy lies in the pretence that there is any real meaning in taking the average in cases where the numbers to be averaged vary greatly. For example, the leader-writer who wrote the above quotation would make a very bad recruiting officer: he might march off eight 10-year-old boys and their 80-year-old teacher to join the army on the ground that their average age was nearly eighteen.

Incidentally, if the Sunday Express's figures are correct (perhaps an unwise assumption) they indicate that the spending on luxuries among the upper class must be very high to bring up the average for the whole country to 18s. 10d. a week per head, since the workers cannot afford to spend anything like that much.

Sound Basis

Captain David Cammans, Assistant Postmaster General, perpetrated a similar fallacy when he said:

  “Mr. Bevan wants us to believe that a country which spends £778 million on tobacco, £488 million on beer. £650 million on gambling, and £107 million on going to the cinema every year cannot afford this charge of £10 million to put the national health service on a sound basis.” (Times, 4-2-52).

Captain Gammans' error here is to take for granted that there is a connection between the total figures of consumption in a country and the rate of consumption among particular groups and individuals within that country. But perhaps Captain Gammans, in spite of having been chairman of the Adamant Investment Corporation and director of five other companies before he became a minister, has been confused by the large sums involved. Let us therefore put a very simple case for the captain and any other readers who may happen to be as backward at statistics as he seems to be.

Elementary paragraph for Tory M.P.s

It is now common knowledge that there are 88,000 persons in this country who admit to having incomes of between £40 and £120 a week after tax, not taking into account income tax evasion and perquisites and expenses accounts, apart from those fortunate few who admit to having incomes even higher. Let us take a mythical figure in this income group, Sir Jasper Turnip-Head, who has an income of £120 a week after tax. In Sir Jasper’s village there are ten cottages, each occupied by a labourer and his family living on about £6 a week. Now Sir Jasper puts aside £20 a week towards extending his shareholdings, and he finds that his living expenses come to about £50 a week. Sir Jasper keeps a small yacht, and hunts regularly, and has an account with a wine and spirit merchant: altogether his luxuries and entertainments come to about £50 a week. The labourers find, though, that after the necessities of food and clothing have been paid for, and after the rent has been handed over, there is only 10s. a week for each family to spend on beer, tobacco and so on. Along comes the government investigator, and he discovers that all the inhabitants of the village. Sir Jasper included, spend a total of £55 a week in luxuries and entertainments. Sir Jasper is much moved by this news, since the country is passing through an economic crisis; so he calls the villagers together and tells them that since, on the average, each family is spending £5 a week on luxuries, they could all afford to go without quite a lot of things they now buy.

Alwyn Edgar

The Passing Show: From the top (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the top
Who is for democracy?

Not Lord Citrine, if we are to judge by his recent speech in the House of Lords. The Daily Herald (15/6/61) reported him as saying:

  The TUC leadership has been weakened at almost successive annual conferences in recent years.
  I have sat and writhed in the balconies time after time when I have seen a wise, constructive policy put from the platform and defeated by the delegates on the floor.
  This is lamentable, because 1 do not think that really broad-minded policy can ever come from the bottom.
  I believe it must come from the top, from people who are capable of viewing the whole field.

This is a strong argument for dictatorship, from the man who was for twenty years general secretary of the TUC. If his views are held by many others in the head offices of trade unions, it would partly account for the yawning gap which exists in many unions between the officials and the rank-and-file.

Lord Citrine had more to say. He delivered a swingeing attack on the workers for their ignorance of economics. He said:

  The average worker has not the least realisation of the dangers of inflation. He does not understand that the economy can get out of hand and that savings can disappear overnight.

Perhaps the workers would show more concern about the fate of savings if the system we live under allowed him to accumulate any savings worth mentioning. But since one of the basic laws of capitalism is that the workers are paid only enough to keep them able to do the work required of them and to bring up the next generation of wage-earners, the protection of savings is a purely academic point for them. Those who have savings, i.e., the capitalists, will do their level best to see that nothing happens to them even if sometimes, since capitalism is essentially an anarchic system, they are not altogether successful. This is a problem for the capitalists, and we can leave it to them.

Lord Citrine, however, had better be more careful about upbraiding the workers for their ignorance. If they take him at his word, and find out the real nature of the present system of society, their next step will be to end it and to introduce Socialism. And what would happen then to Citrine’s noble title, and to the House of Lords where he airs his views, and to the cult of leadership which he supports?


Nothing defensive
Socialists have pointed out many, many times the absurd misuse of words when a ruling class arms itself with weapon-like bombs and then claims that is simply taking “defensive” precautions. The odd thing is that any ruling class, and its tame propagandists, can see this perfectly well—when the actions of any other ruling class are being discussed.

One example was seen recently in the Times. The Times leader-writers have very often discussed Britain’s "defence" preparations, the “defence" estimates, the country’s “defence” forces, and so on. But all this was forgotten when the executive of the Indonesian ruling class. President Sukarno, got Russia to agree to supply him with modern military aircraft. The Indonesian claim that these were merely for “defensive” purposes was seen at once as a hollow pretence. What was obscure to the leader-writers when it happened under their noses in Britain became crystal clear in the distant lands of southeast Asia. The first leader (5/7/61) said smugly:

  Jet bombers that are as advanced as any in the world have nothing defensive about them and it is obvious enough that West New Guinea provides the motive.

This is quite right, of course: one of the main aims of the Indonesian ruling class is to extend its rule over West New Guinea, which is at present still ruled by the Dutch. Obviously, as the leader says, modern jet bombers have nothing defensive about them. But what a curious case of selective blindness that the writer could not see that this applies to British jet bombers as much as to jet bombers in Russia or Indonesia!


Over-salted
In a world where many millions go hungry, one would have thought that the rich would try to conceal their more extravagant excesses of over-eating. But not so. One American gourmet is on a round-the-world “tasting trip,” and the Observer (6/8/61) tells us that he arrived in Tokio bringing with him:

   . . .  an alarm wrist-watch to time the grilling of steaks, a golden ball which will not sink immediately into caviar if it is over-salted, a miniature pair of scales for weighing meat and a microscope for checking its grain. He also carries a fourteen-point grading chart for statistical purposes.

Perhaps the very insensitiveness the members of the upper class, their willingness to display publicly the great gulf between the rich and the poor, will contribute not a little to their eventual downfall.

Alwyn Edgar

Where is Everybody? (2016)

From the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you go out into the country at night, you might find a spot far enough away from our glaring towns and cities to allow you to see the apparently innumerable twinkling points of light which remind us that our sun is only a minor star in a minor star system. Scientists tell us that even in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, there must be at least a hundred billion stars. The Milky Way is just a small and unimportant galaxy. Altogether, the astronomers say, there are probably something like ten trillion galaxies in the universe. That is, in the universe which we are able to observe; there may be a lot more galaxies out beyond the edge of our knowledge. To write out the number of stars in the observable universe you would need a one, followed by twenty-four noughts – that is, a million million million million stars. And very many of those stars are now believed to have habitable planets circling round them. So some, in fact a vast number of those planets might have developed intelligent life. Scientists have been trying for years to pick up any signals from alien civilizations, but have drawn a complete blank.

This situation has puzzled scientists for a long time, and as long ago as the 1950s the physicist Enrico Fermi demanded – where is everybody? In such a fantastically enormous universe, it’s just not possible that we should be alone. Now two physics professors, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, have written a new book, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos, which offers an explanation. When they get to a certain point of development, the authors write, all civilizations probably produce both extraordinarily powerful weapons, and also destructive greenhouse gases. But (so the theory goes) they do not produce a political or social system which can handle these things. And so, either by ruining their own atmosphere by pollution from industry and transport, or by engaging in mutually destructive warfare, each civilisation destroys itself. So that’s why we on the Earth, in defiance of all rational expectation, are on our own. All other developing civilisations either have not got to the point of trying to communicate, or have destroyed themselves.

 According to the Daily Mail (9 October) Professor Cox said:

 ‘One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that. It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.’

Does it sound familiar? It would not need much imagination to see our planet going the same way. We should at least ask ourselves whether the devastating power which the human race now possesses is already beyond the control of humanity’s poor efforts at statesmanship. The countries which have already had their industrial revolution are trying to limit, sometimes not very successfully, their pollution of the atmosphere; countries which are now going through an industrial revolution feel they should be allowed to emit the same amount of pollution that other countries did years ago. As for the other way in which these authors think all other civilizations have probably killed themselves, the world has potentially reached that stage as well. As each capitalist state fights to preserve its territory, its trade, its position in the world, each armed with hydrogen bombs and other fearsome weapons, it is unfortunately quite possible that some hot-headed maniac (and there are plenty of those who have manoeuvred themselves into power in various countries round the world – can you imagine what a ‘President Trump’ might decide to do?) could plunge us all into nuclear hostilities which could destroy or cripple the entire human race. So we desperately need ‘global collaborative solutions’ and ‘political expertise’ to avoid disaster. If you look at it this way, socialism – which would end the pollution of our atmosphere, and also extinguish the competitive hostility which capitalism inevitably entails – is not only a desirable alternative, but the only one.

Alwyn Edgar

The Passing Show: ’Ardies’ ’At (1958)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

’Ardies’ ’At
At the Labour Party conference the executive only narrowly escaped defeat on a motion which advocated the integration of the public schools in the state system. This would mean the end of public schools as we know them, and the speakers who called for this won the applause of the conference. The executive finally succeeded in getting the motion rejected only because the majority of those old props of the platform, the union block votes, was behind them.

But what difference would it make to our society, which rests on the exploitation of the many by the few, if every public school was closed down tomorrow? Some Labourites seem to come near to believing in this connection that if we all dropped our H's and spoke with provincial accents we should have taken a stride forward towards Socialism. It reminds one of the people who, when asked why the Labour Party claims to be Socialist, recall that Keir Hardie turned up at the House of Commons in a cloth cap, and seem to think that it clinches the argument. But the important thing is not how you dress, but what you do; not how you speak, but what you say.



Miss Bacon’s Dislikes
Even the speakers from the platform had to join in the general denunciation. Alice Bacon, M.P., who replied to the debate for the executive, said, “we all detest and dislike the public schools.” If by “all” she meant all the people in the Labour Party, the statement is not true. Many leading Labourites not only went to public schools themselves, but send their children there as well. The reason is simple and obvious—they think that children get a better education at public schools than they do at state schools. The equipment and accommodation at the average public school is much better than it is at the average state school, teachers at public schools get more social prestige and higher pay, so teachers with the highest academic qualifications tend to go to them, and most important of all, a teacher at a state secondary or grammar school often has to take a class of thirty-five or forty, while his public school colleague can concentrate on a much smaller number. Naturally those Labour leaders who can afford it send their children to public schools.

Under new management
But the question goes much deeper than this. Even supposing that we had absolute equality of opportunity—which is impossible in a Capitalist society—even supposing that no member of the ruling class could give money or shares or a better education to his children, and that while the Smiths and Browns provided the Capitalists of this generation, the Joneses and the Robinsons provided the Capitalists of the next (again, impossible, but let it pass) even supposing all this, we should have exactly the same society that we have now. So long as we have a Capitalist society—part private and part state, like the Conservatives want, or a little-less-private and a little-more-state like the Labourites want—we will have the exploitation of the mass of people, the working class, by a small minority, the ruling class. To support Capitalism while demanding equality of opportunity is like supporting burglary, provided everyone has an equal chance to become a burglar. Equality of opportunity in our present society simply means that each generation of Capitalists would have different names from the last lot. But who in the world cares what they are called? To alter a familiar line, a sewer by any other name would smell as foul.


The Socialist Answer
Of course, there would be no public schools in a Socialist society. It would be impossible for one child to be huddled with forty others in a badly-vefltilated room opposite a soap factory, with the teacher wondering how he can keep up the instalments, while another is in a class of ten or twelve, in an airy room in pleasant surroundings. In a Socialist society, the members of it would determine what education would best fit children for living, and the children would have equal opportunities to benefit by it. But those Labourites who call for the abolition of public schools in our present society are confusing, as they so often do. the effects with the cause.


The Methods of Colonel Grivas
There are some facts about Cyprus which seem to have been forgotten.

Colonel Grivas, who is the head of Eoka, has a long history of extreme right wing activity, and of willingness to resort to violence to achieve his ends. It would not strain an over-used word to call him a Fascist.

Grivas took the opportunity of the feeling aroused by the announcement by a member of the British Government in the House of Commons that Cyprus could “never” be given its independence to begin a campaign of terrorism in the island, which still continues. This campaign is directed not only against the British, but also against Grivas's political opponents among the Greeks, who make up more than eighty per cent, of the island's population. Grivas has killed more Greeks than he has Britons. This fact has been repeatedly stressed by the British authorities. Some of the Greeks have been killed by shooting, others by being beaten or hacked to death in circumstances of revolting brutality: both men and women have been murdered.

A Death in Famagusta

In early October a British woman, the wife of a soldier, was shot dead in the streets of Famagusta. At the time of writing it is not known who did it. Eoka have issued leaflets denying responsibly, and the authorities say that if it was an Eoka gunman, this is the first British woman killed by Eoka. However, it seems more likely to have been done by Eoka than by anyone else.

This was a most deplorable crime. The woman had five children, the youngest being still in arms. What happens to the children now? Inevitably the crime must have a terrible effect on them. There is a saying that if you educate a woman, you educate a family: and there is a grim sense in which it is true to say, if you kill a woman, you kill a family.

More Deaths in Famagusta

As soon as the crime was known, a body of British troops descended on the district of the town where the murder, as it happened, had taken place. Famagusta is not a large town, and in it numbers of Greeks have been killed by Eoka because Grivas did not like their politics. No doubt in this district there were many Greeks who have had friends or relatives shot or otherwise brutally done to death by Eoka.

The British troops cordoned off the district, and proceeded to arrest every young man they could find. Within hours a thirty-year-old Greek was dead from suffocation, having been thrust into an army lorry with many others who had the misfortune to live in the area; an eighteen-year-old Greek was also dead, in circumstances which have not yet been revealed; a British soldier had been accidentally shot dead by one of his own comrades; ambulances were running shuttle services carrying injured Greeks from the temporary compounds where they were being “questioned" by British troops; no less than two hundred and fifty Greeks had been treated for injuries (“only" sixteen had been retained in hospital, said an official spokesman—"only" is an interesting word to use in this connection); and a twelve-year-old girl, having seen the “questioning” in progress, ran away in terror and died of shock. Apart from this the material damage, such as car-windows and shop-windows smashed in, was considerable.

These figures of casualties are those given by British official sources: unofficial sources put the numbers of dead and injured higher. (At first even an official spokesman said five Greeks had died during the operations, according to The Observer. October 5th, 1958, but subsequently he admitted less.)

Revenge—on whom?

If the dead and wounded Greeks, down to the twelve-year-old girl, had all been proved members or supporters of Eoka, then the British ruling class could claim that their soldiers were taking revenge—assuming that revenge, rather than the usual claim of “justice,” is to be the British aim in Cyprus. But the victims of this military brutality were simply those Greeks who happened to live in the area—people who, the British authorities admit, are terrorised by Grivas and have suffered more in the way of Eoka killings than the British themselves.

Broken heads, but no violence

Sir Hugh Foot, the Governor of Cyprus, one of whose duties theoretically is to look after the welfare of the citizens under him, issued a statement after these events saying “Our first obligation is to stand against violence,” but made not even the most perfunctory expression of regret for the activities of the British troops. Presumably death and injury do not come within his definition of violence when the sufferers are only Greek Cypriots. The War Minister, Mr. Soames, has denied that the troops concerned were out of control; for which one can only conclude that the things they did were not objected to by their officers and commanders. Mr. Soames said that he was very satisfied with the conduct of our troops in Cyprus (Manchester Guardian, October 7th, 1958). According to a BBC broadcast, Mr. Duncan Sandys, the Defence Minister, claimed that he was proud of the way the British troops had behaved.

Pride—and prejudice

Couldn't you have said, Mr. Soames, that you would have been even more satisfied if the British troops had injured only two hundred, say, of the local inhabitants, instead of two hundred and fifty? Couldn't you have said, Mr. Sandys, that you would have been even more proud if the soldiers during these operations had caused the deaths of only three people, say, instead of four?

How satisfied, how proud, can you get?

Alwyn Edgar

Book Received: ‘Clans and Clearance – The Highland Clearances Vol.1’ (2018)

From the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Clans and Clearance – The Highland Clearances Vol.1’ by Alwyn Edgar (Theory and Practice ISBN 978-0-9956609-3-9.)

This volume (one of five) says the Preface, ‘looks at the clearances generally, and at some surprising orthodox beliefs about them; and then examines the Highland clans as they were before the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-6, an account which sometimes differs from what is now often affirmed’.

For a previous article by the same author on the same subject see: Primitive Accumulation (1967)

The Passing Show: Vote for Tallulah (1952)

The Passing Show Column from the December 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vote for Tallulah
Mr. Joseph Harsch, writing in an American paper during the election campaign, said that "the object in politics is the attraction of the maximum number of potential voters from the opponent's camp." This is saying what Socialists have often said about the big political parties' approach to politics. The Americans seem to be franker about the whole business. If one spoke of the rival shows put on by the opposing parties, one would in Britain be speaking metaphorically; but in America, the phrase becomes literally exact. The Democrats and the Republicans both put on shows on the stage and on television in order to appeal to the taste for entertainment of the public—no doubt because there isn't sufficient difference in the programmes of the two parties for them to be able to appeal to the voters' reason. Governor Stevenson was fortunate enough to get Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein to organise a show for him, including such eminent political figures as Miss Tallulah Bankhead and Miss Lauren Bacall.


Climbing on the Bandwaggon
Now that the American public, after having duly considered the inducements offered them, have decided that General Eisenhower is the man to run American Capitalism for the next four years, the other Western allies have been falling over themselves to ingratiate themselves with him. Mr. Churchill wired that he was looking forward to "a renewal of our comradeship and of our work together for the same causes of peace and freedom as in the past." Mr. Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, sent a message that he was confident "that under your leadership the splendid friendship and co-operation which exists between our respective nations will be maintained and strengthened." No doubt it will—but it will be the co-operation of the sergeant and the recruit. The sergeant gives the order and the recruit co-operates by carrying it out. And it is too bad for the recruit if his interests happen to clash with those of the sergeant. Mr. Churchill put the position with rare and surprising frankness when he said at the Alamein Reunion last October 24th, referring to General Ridgway, that "as far as Britain is concerned, we stand under his orders and at his right hand."


One up for Mr. Gulbenkian
If you read in the “Politics” that Aristotle approved of private property because, among other things, it allowed the exercise of the virtue of generosity, you might heave a sigh of relief and think “At least nobody uses that excuse any longer." For it seems much like saying that it is a good thing for Jones to hit Smith over the head, because it allows him then to display his kindness of heart by picking his victim out of the gutter. One is glad to hear that Mr. Calouste Gulbenkian, the oil-king, has given a Velasquez to Lisbon Museum, but it seems hard that the thousands of oil-workers in Mr. Gulbenkian’s concerns should be exploited merely so that Mr. Gulbenkian can do himself a bit of good in the hereafter by such acts of generosity.


Very Suitable
But if you think that Aristotle was out of date, you would be wrong. For when on October 30th an M.P. asked the Minister of Health if he would "incorporate into the national medical scheme the cost of fully financing all cancer research in order to make this necessary work independent of public subscriptions," he got this reply from the Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary, Miss Homsby-Smith: "No. Cancer research is a very, suitable field for private generosity which the Minister would not wish to discourage."

But why leave it there, Miss Smith? Why not make armaments buying, now done by the State, a field for "private generosity”?—so that those who wanted armaments could buy them. In this reply is summed up succinctly the capitalist order of priority. Anything which directly safeguards profits, such as arms to fight off foreign capitalist states, or subsidies and allowances which keep workers passive, and ward off strikes which destroy profits, is attended to by the State with its compulsory powers. Anything the influence of which on profits is too remote is left to “private generosity." This reply gives the lie once for all to the contention that our free or cheap doctoring is a "Health Service." It isn't; it is a Fit-for-Work Service. It is designed to keep the workers fit enough to produce and reproduce. If it were really a health service, there could be no object more suitable for its attention than research into a disease like cancer. But since the bearing of such research on the central cause of profits is not obvious to the present Government, it is cast out into the wintry wastes of private generosity, where, if those individuals with money to spare deign to hand any over, research will be done; otherwise it will be severely restricted.


The feminine touch
This incident should also be considered by those who maintain that "men" as such do most of the harm in the world, and that if more women were in Parliament and the Government society would somehow become more humane. This reply in Parliament was given by a woman; and a more brutal statement could not have been made by any man in her position. In politics the division is not between man and woman, but between those who want a Capitalist and those who want a Socialist society.

Alwyn Edgar

Death of a Dictator (2012)

From the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Second World War Russia (or the U.S.S.R. as it was then), which had been fighting Germany since the Nazi invasion of 1941, only got round to declaring war on Japan on 8 August 1945. That was three days after the first atomic bomb landed on Hiroshima and one day before the second landed on Nagasaki. The Japanese empire was now squeezed between the vast armed forces of Russia and America, and it disintegrated. Japan had forcibly annexed Korea in 1910, but the Japanese were now driven out. The U.S.S.R occupied the northern half of Korea with its capital at Pyongyang, and the U.S.A. occupied the southern half with its capital at Seoul.

Russia’s ruling clique then favoured state capitalism, while America’s rulers favoured private capitalism. In the south, under American occupation, Syngman Rhee (a Korean who had studied at American universities, had spent the previous twenty years in the U.S.A., and had westernised his name) became the ruler, and private capitalism took over the economy. In the north, Kim Il-sung (a Korean brought up in Manchuria, who had been an officer in the Chinese armies and then in the Russian armies) was hastily tutored in the Korean language, which he had largely forgotten, and was installed in power; the economy was state capitalist. In the south Syngman Rhee instituted a repressive and corrupt regime, jailing and killing any who protested until he was forced to resign by a popular uprising in 1960. In the north Kim Il-sung instituted a repressive and corrupt regime, jailing and killing any who protested, but he was able to rule till his death in 1994.

The two Koreas were very much simply proxies for the great countries that had set them up and supported them. From the first there were many raids and skirmishes between the north and the south, and from 1950 to 1953 there was open warfare, with the Americans (and British) supporting the south and the Chinese supporting the north. The battles swept over the whole country: the front line was at first pushed to the extreme south, then back to the extreme north, and then south again. Korea experienced all the delights of modern war: air raids, great battles, trench warfare, death and destruction, all ranged over the whole peninsula. As in many wars since, no one actually counted the corpses, but one estimate is that there were two million or more Korean civilian deaths, plus of course many Korean, and American, and Chinese, and British soldiers. (One of the writer’s classmates at school, an enthusiastic member of the “cadet corps”, joined the army when he left school and was killed in Korea.)

Kim Il-sung was set up by the state propaganda machine as being virtually divine, a being that, it was pretty strongly hinted, had created the world. A new calendar was inaugurated, in which 1912, when Kim Il-sung was born, was year one. When Kim Il-sung died in year eighty-three – or 1994 – his son Kim Jong-il was put into his place and ruled in the same way as his father had done

North Korea saw itself as part of the state-capitalist bloc, which included Russia and China. It was and is harshly authoritarian. Dissent is met by torture, and North Korea is third in the list of the world’s countries carrying out executions – those condemned are killed publicly by firing squads. In 2004 a Human Rights Watch report said that North Korea was “among the world’s most repressive governments”: there were up to 200,000 political prisoners. It was dubbed the world’s most corrupt country in a “Corruption Index”. North Korea is the thirty-ninth largest country by population, but it has the world’s fourth largest army: in a population of twenty-four million, 1.1 million are military personnel, and 8.2 million active reservists. It has been called “the most militarized country in the world today”; it has the world’s third-largest chemical weapons stockpile, and it possesses its own nuclear warheads.

At the end of last century the state-capitalist bloc had begun to fall apart. In the 1990s Russia dismantled state capitalism in favour of private capitalism, and China took steps along the same road. More and more, North Korea found itself isolated. This was bad news, since capitalism (of whichever variety) operates most profitably by disregarding state boundaries. On top of that, 1995 and 1996 saw disastrous floods in North Korea, and there was a calamitous drought in 1997. The ordinary people suffered grievously. Although detailed figures are hard to obtain in the kind of xenophobic dictatorship that North Korea had become, some reports say that a million North Koreans, or perhaps two million, died of famine. North Koreans have an official salary of £1 or £2 per week, but lucky ones can make more by trading in tolerated private markets.

The twenty-first century saw some steps towards the modification of the system, with private capitalism being allowed a larger share of the economy. 2002 saw the introduction of what North Korea’s rulers called “landmark socialist-type market economic practices”. It is hardly necessary to say that this change had nothing to do with socialism; it was a dilution of the previously prevailing state capitalism with some admixture of the private variety. (And it may be significant that when the North Korean constitution was re-written in 2009, any reference to “communism” was dropped; perhaps a very belated concession to honesty.) The changes of the early twenty-first century allowed foreign firms into the country to operate “manufacturing facilities”. For example, the “Kaesong Industrial Park” was created just north of the demilitarised zone which separates the two Koreas; here South Korean companies were allowed to operate, and by 2010 they employed over 40,000 North Korean workers.

It will not surprise anyone to hear that Kim Jong-il (the “Dear Leader” and “Our Father”) who had succeeded his father Kim Il-sung (the “Great Leader” and “Eternal President”) in 1994 was able to protect his own living standards during these tragic times. He had seventeen different palatial residences scattered across North Korea. He was fond of burgundy and bordeaux, and in some years he was the world’s biggest buyer of Hennessy cognac – up to half a million pounds worth of it. His chef went round the world to secure foreign delicacies. When he visited China and Russia (in a special train – he was afraid of flying) fresh lobster was flown to his train every day. Several of his staff were employed to check that the grains of rice served to him were absolutely identical in size and colour. He liked watching films and had a collection of 20,000 videotapes and DVDs. A song glorifying him – “No motherland without you” – was regularly piped from public loudspeakers in Pyongyang. No dictator exists without the support of an upper class, and in North Korea there is a small group at the top who are apparently doing very well, and defying the world’s embargoes and sanctions by importing luxury items through China.

It is very difficult to be sure what was happening in North Korea and what was being said in North Korea because the whole power of the North Korean state was brought to bear to create insuperable barriers between the North Koreans and the rest of the world. But so far as one can work it out the state media of North Korea – and there was no other kind – was endlessly asserting that Kim Jong-il was a most remarkable person. Apparently you might have known that someone special had appeared when he was born because according to the official sources of information his birth (which was foretold by a swallow – I’m not sure how) was marked by the appearance of a double rainbow and a new star in the sky. He began walking at three weeks, and he began talking at eight weeks. (Why did he take so long?)

When he went to university (at Kim Il-sung University, Pyongyang), he wrote 1,500 books over the three years – that’s ten books a week, or about a book and a half every day. Book-writing was not his only achievement. He was also able to compose no fewer than six operas, which, said his official biography, turned out to be “better than any in the history of music”. He also staged a number of elaborate musicals. Sport was no problem. Some reports had him winning gold at every event in the Seoul Olympics of 1988, which was quite an achievement, but it was the more remarkable since – having been born in 1941 – he was then forty-seven years old. So there’s hope for us all. Hostile press reports from foreign countries alleging that North Korea had actually boycotted the Games because they were still officially at war with South Korea can safely be ignored.

Never having played golf before, he strolled on to a golf course one day, picking up some clubs for the first time, and on his first eighteen holes he returned a score of thirty-eight under par – a world record by some considerable distance – having been expert enough to shoot eleven of the holes in one. This cannot be doubted since he had seventeen bodyguards with him, all of whom verified the feat. Perhaps they all stood round each hole that Kim aimed at, willing the golf ball to follow the correct political line. (As politicians and journalists vied with each other to eulogize their leader, the stories improved: some earlier versions of the golfing triumph gave him only a measly five holes-in-one.)

In his spare time he invented the hamburger; and his distinctive style of clothing “led world-wide fashion trends”. Some state media gave the strong impression that he could control the weather. One doesn’t know how he found time for all these activities in addition to supervising the whole government of North Korea, but then one finds that he never had to go to the lavatory, so that must have given him a bit more time. When Kim Jong-il died last December, the reader will not be surprised to hear that “a fierce snowstorm paused” and the sky glowed red above the sacred North Korean Mount Paektu, while the ice on a lake nearby cracked so loud that “it seemed to shake the heavens and the earth”. At the moment of his death a crane was observed to circle a statue of his father Kim Il-sung, before landing on a nearby tree, “its head bowed in sorrow”.

People who have listened to this kind of garbage all their lives (and have never even heard, as it were, any counter-garbage) might well feel desperately sad when such an outstanding figure dies, and that may help to account for the pictures of mass wailing and weeping which emerged from North Korea recently. Even those who have retained enough common sense (which is, of course, very uncommon) to disbelieve the unbelievable might well realize that if they were not sobbing loudly enough, the omnipresent military and security forces might well be tempted to give them something to make them lament in real earnest.

Nonsense knows no national or temporal boundaries, and when Kim Jong-il died on 17 December, the Western world was all geared up for its annual celebrations of another great man whose birth was also marked by the appearance of an extra star in the sky and at whose death a great darkness overwhelmed the earth (Matthew 2-2 and 27-45).

Strangely, when Kim Jong-il died, the man who immediately stepped into his shoes as North Korea’s dictator was his son, Kim Jong-un. He does not appear to have done anything in particular up to now except choose his parents carefully, although his appearance suggests that so far he has successfully fended off famine. However, no doubt the Pyongyang publicity boys will soon come up with something wonderful, so we wait with bated breath.

Before we all split our sides laughing, perhaps we should remember that we ourselves (like the Koreans) live in a system where a small group of people own everything worth owning and live luxuriously on the proceeds, while the great majority (who own very little) spend their lives desperately working so that great amounts of rent, interest and profit can be paid to this small group. Furthermore, the media continually tell us that this system is the best that ever has been, or ever could be, devised. Now, no one would ever believe that, would they?

Alwyn Edgar