Voice From The Back: A high priest speaks (1998)

The Voice From The Back column from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A high priest speaks

"Markets are surely one of God’s great gifts to mankind. But alas, man is conceited. Nowhere is this more manifest than in politics". Sir Alan Walters, Financial Mail on Sunday, 5 July.

A worshipper sings

"Americans have been experiencing the heartiest bull market in history. The Dow Jones average of 30 blue-chip allegedly representative industrials has more than doubled, from 3,760 in June 1994 to flirting with 9,000 today. Unemployment is 4.3 percent while inflation and interest rates have inexplicably remained low . . . With the computer revolution at full throttle, the strictures of classical economics appear no longer relevant for the US. And the economic chattering classes-from the stately John Kenneth Galbraith through the cryptic Alan Greenspan to the trendy Esther Dyson can only anticipate millennium market madness. Let the good times roll". Crocker Snow Jr, World Times, Boston, 5 July.

Hunger persuades

"American legislation to put a time limit on welfare payments is proving a success as more people find jobs. Figures show that people are moving off the unemployment register twice as quickly now than before 1996, when Congress imposed the limits. The Republican law, which went much further than reforms being tried in Britain, was denounced as inhumane because it laid down that no one could receive more than a total of five years of welfare payments from the federal government during their lifetime". Telegraph, 20 June.

Sacrificial victim protests

"[G]rowing evidence suggest that the larger the income gap, the wider the health gap. For example, infant mortality in social classes IV and V in the UK is twice as high as in Sweden. In America’s booming economy, the gap has now reached the point where a child born in Bangladesh has a greater life expectancy than a child born in Harlem". Donald Read, Chief Executive, Association for Public Health, letter in Guardian, 23 July.

Noblesse oblige

"Land reforms proposed for Scotland could destroy traditional family estates, according to the Duke of Buccleuch, Britain’s largest landowner. The duke, 74, who owns more than 400 square miles, mainly in the Borders, said that the system of land ownership most [people] sought to preserve was falling apart . . . . In a 17-page document, the duke said that only 80 years ago nearly 90 percent of the countryside in Scotland was managed by traditional family run estates. Today it is less than 30 percent, due mainly, he said to a wealth tax in the form of estate duty". Daily Telegraph, 20 June.

Dirty neighbours

"The governments of Norway, Sweden and Denmark are demanding that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria stops reprocessing after it was found that radioactive seaweed collected on their countries’ coasts is a result of new discharges from the site. An analysis by Southampton University shows that levels of Technetium-99-a rare radioactive element which is a waste product of reprocessing plutonium-has increased 15-fold in Norwegian seaweed since the early 1990s. A new plant that discharges Technetium-99 was opened in 1994 at Sellafield and the increases are linked to that". Guardian, 18 June.

Ssh-not a word!

" “Well, all this is a sanitised area,” he said, gesturing at the hotel atop the ridge, the manicured lawns, the trimmed shrubs, the tennis courts, the winding driveway up to the front door, the police checkpoint, more police again in the woods. “Really, you’re wasting your time,” he said. “Really, you are-there’s no one booked to play today.” He was a plain clothes member of Operation Orchid, the codename given by Strathclyde police to the impenetrable security ring surrounding this year’s Bilderberg meetings; a highly exclusive, little known and barely reported annual conference which has been held since 1954 at grand hotels across Europe and the USA. Attendees debate the state of the world and, critics insist, manipulate global politics and economics from behind the scenes. At Turnberry last month, the 120-strong guest list made intriguing reading . . . There was Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, billionaire chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank; Giovanni Agnelli, head of the Fiat empire; Javier Solana, secretary general of Nato; Jurgen Schrempp, chairman of Daimler-Benz; the chairmen or chief execs of the Xerox Corporation, BP, Reuters and a bunch of big-league banks and law firms; John Deutch, former head of the CIA; Tory leader William Hague, Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan; Defence Secretary George Robertson; assorted other politicos . . . No reporters are admitted, no press conferences held, and no record of what was said is published". Night & Day, 14 June.

Who Controls the World? (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some people think that a sinister elite controls the world from behind the scenes. Candidates for this role range from the Bilderberg Group (which does exist) to the Elders of Zion (who don’t). These conspiracy theorists would be heartened by a recent headline in the New Scientist: “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world.”

A study of 43,000 transnational corporations (TNCs) by a team of systems theorists from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich  revealed: ‘a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1,318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "rear economy” - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues. When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity'' of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cert of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cert of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network".’ (newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500)

‘Runs the world’ is too strong as it implies that the ‘super-entity’ is actually in control of the economy whereas its components have to operate within and accept the constraints of the uncontrollable world market.

Nor is any conspiracy implied. It is rather a description of the structure of the world economy. Systems theorists see it as a typical pattern of complex systems. For Marxists, it’s confirmation of Marx’s view that the tendency of capitalism is for the concentration and centralisation of production and ownership.

The researchers claim a practical outcome from their research: that, as the New Scientist put it, it could help identify ways of making capitalism more stable’.

The assumption seems to be that if one of the 1,318 gets into financial trouble this will affect all those others within the network with which it has links. But the links that are relevant for the workings of the economy are not so much ownership and control as suppliers (sellers) and buyers (users). If, for instance, because of overproduction in the industry, a steel plant has to close, then the suppliers of all its materials will be affected; as will its workers and those of its suppliers and the stores and shops which sell them consumer goods. That’s the way overproduction in one key industry spreads to the rest of the economy.

The researchers’ proposal – ‘global anti-trust rules … to limit over-connection amongst TNCs’ – wouldn’t solve this problem. In fact it might make it worse by encouraging more, inevitably chaotic competition. In any event, it is only intended to prevent the initial shock spreading so fast and so far. Since capitalist production proceeds by way of series stops and starts such shocks are inevitable from time to time. There’s nothing governments can do to prevent this. Conspiracy theorists misread this as showing that governments are beholden to a shadowy elite.

They can relax. The world economy is not controlled by an elite (even if there is an easily identifiable elite that benefits from it). It is not controlled by anybody. It’s an uncontrollable economic mechanism that can only be ended by making the Earth’s resources, natural and industrial, the common heritage of all.  A ‘New World Order’, if you like, but a democratic one.