Voice From the Back: The benefits of globalisation (2001)

The Voice From the Back column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The benefits of globalisation

“With a “catastrophe” in the world’s trade and many growers facing starvation, a leading coffee buyer appealed to the International Coffee Organisation in London yesterday for a tax of $1 on a 50kg bag to save farmers . . . “It is a huge and wealthy industry, yet the beans are grown almost entirely by very poor people who receive hardly anything for their labours.” . . . Prices have halved to $75 a bag this year, mainly because of a World Bank-financed drive to plant coffee in Vietnam. Production has risen from 4m bags to 16m. Big firms, including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee, which owns Douwe Egberts, have kept prices up to benefit shareholders while the price to growers has halved.” Guardian (27 September). The rich get richer and the impoverished producers get poorer. Sound familiar? The answer isn’t a $1 tax but the complete transformation of society from one based on production for profit to one based on production solely for use.

Futile reforms

“The recovery of the ozone layer could be delayed significantly because the chemicals produced to replace those banned in the Montreal Protocol are proving equally damaging and are not controlled by international law, the UN Environment Programme reported.” Times (17 October). Another example of how reforms often don’t solve the problems of capitalism and another reason to get rid of it.

Save the children

During October the charity organisation Save The Children mounted a massive publicity drive to raise funds. According to their appeal “Around the world today, one in four children live in poverty – poverty serious enough to blight their lives just as they are beginning. Poverty can leave children without enough food to eat, rob them of the chance to go to school and force them into poorly paid work – vulnerable to adult abuse and exploitation.” How abusive can be gauged by the experience of a nine year old who worked for two years as a sari embroiderer, fell sick, was sent home and was paid nothing for 2 years work. The charity’s solution – send £3 a month! If only these well-meaning people would look beyond the effects of poverty to its cause we might really be able to save the children.

Same old Tories

Anyone who thought that two crushing electoral defeats would change the core policies of the Conservative Party can rest assured that the old Tory Party is sticking by its principles – support the rich against the poor. The columnist Matthew Parris writing in the Times (10 October) on their annual conference illustrated that very well when he observed: “The Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, railed yesterday against a Government he accused of leaving people to die in the queue for heart treatment – and was met with stony silence. Then he scolded the Government for cheating the shareholders of Railtrack – and was greeted by applause.”

Land of the free?

It reads like an Orwell-inspired dystopia, a nightmarish piece of fiction, but it is a recent letter to the editor of a mass circulation magazine. It reveals the frightening mind-set of some workers scared by the World Trade Towers disaster. Capitalism breeds paranoia and xenophobia, but even by capitalism’s standards the following is pretty scary stuff. “Our people must take an active part in the vigilant protection of our country. Civilians must assume roles in our civil defense as block watchers, neighborhood police, campus observers and providers of information to authorities about those who act suspiciously or who voice anti-American opinions.” Patrick Grant, New York City. Time Magazine (15 October).

More waste makers

Many years ago in his book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard wrote about “planned obsolescence”; the artful dodge of manufacturing products that needed to be replaced all the time. Some 40 years later we have the perfect example of this in the music business. Concerned about the misuse and selling on of the latest singles released to music executives for compiling play lists, the ingenious boffins of the music business have come up with a cunning ploy. “Tornado, the distributor of digital media products, has found a way of making Mission Impossible come to life. It has designed a voice recording that self-destructs after it has been played.” Sunday Times (7 October). There is no limit to the ingenuity of capitalism when it comes to protecting profits. Inside socialism, human inventiveness will be used for something more important than Mission Impossible recordings.

Classless society?

In his recent book Almost Like A Whale the geneticist Steve Jones comes up with some figures on land ownership that would seem to contradict those who argue that we live in a classless society where the barriers of ownership have been broken down. “Half the private land in Scotland is owned by three hundred and fifty people (in a country where half the population has no landed property at all); and the greatest proprietor of all, at a quarter of a million acres, is the Duke of Buccleuch. The Duke’s lesser titles include a couple of Earldoms, a Barony or two – and the Lordship of Eskdale”

They said it . . . (1992)

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We had women on every platform daring the election, hat the party used them like decorative potted plants—Labour MP Ann Clwyd on women and the Labour Party.

#    #    #    #

I did it because they were going to repossess my Sky dish—David Kernaghan, explaining the armed robbery which brought him a seven-year gaol sentence.

#    #    #    #

You should not believe everything you read in the newspapers—Robert Clark, chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers. 

#    #    #    #

It is quite a work to dredge out of the English language pejoratives strong enough to describe their vulgarity, brutishness and maladroitness—Former Tory Minister Alan Clark on the royal family.

#    #    #    #

Nobody was going to throw the first brick because there were too many people living in glass houses—Norman Tebbit on the Mellor scandal.

#    #    #    #

With low coffee prices a symptom of stocks rather than supply, a stock destruction plan by producers would have a greater effect on the world market price than anything else— Lawrence Eagles, commodity analyst.

Voice From The Back: The rat race (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rat race

Inside a socialist society we could all engage in useful, productive work with much shorter hours. What a contrast to the rat race of today. “A report by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF) released this week, will say that despite much talk about “work-life balance”, many people are still working 50-60 hours a week and feel their lives are out of control. Work follows us home. The MHF’s study found a correlation between the number of hours worked and the number of hours spent thinking or worrying about work outside working hours. The more you work, the less free time you have and the more of your free time you spend worrying about work” Sunday Times (20 April).

Refugee hypocrisy

According to the Glaswegian (1 May) more than 100 refugees in Glasgow are being forced to return to Afghanistan in line with the government’s policy to slash the number of refugees in the UK by 50 percent. “Sally Daghlian of the Scottish Refugee Council said the Foreign Office was still advising against all non-essential travel to Kabul and against travel to other parts of Afghanistan.” On the one hand the FO is telling refugees it is safe to go back but warning its own citizens to avoid it because it is still war-torn and subject to the ravages of various warlords. Another piece of political vote-catching with no regard for the safety of the workers who are being deported under armed guard.

A double tragedy

A correspondent to the letters page in the Herald (7 May) tells of a terrible personal tragedy. “The cynically named National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) was set up by the Labour Government to ration healthcare. Its guidelines are stringent in the extreme and are binding on all medical practitioners . . . The availability of NHS drugs was the final straw for me in terms of my allegiance to the Labour Party. My 32 years’ link was severed on the death of my wife last year. She was denied the drug Temodal on grounds of cost. This drug could have extended her life and would have most assuredly have lessened her distress in the final three months of it.” If the writer of that letter had been a member of the owning class his wife would have had a less awful existence. It is tragic that this woman died but it is even more tragic that millions of humans are doomed to die because of their lack of money.

Political porkies

Politicians lie; and that is official according to a recent government-funded report. “Politics should be regarded as less like an exercise in producing truthful statements and more like a poker game,” said author Glen Newey, reader in politics at the University of Strathclyde. “And there is an expectation by a poker player that you try to deceive them as part of the game.” . . . “Newey’s report – published by by the government-funded Economic and Social Research Council – adds that not only is lying ‘sometimes justifiable’ where there is a public interest, for instance where national security is at risk, but voters even have a ‘right to be lied to’ about things where they would rather not know what had happened, such as what was done during a war” Observer (18 May).

A leader speaks

Here is one of your leaders speaking. Speaking in the usual doublespeak of political waffle. In this case it is the leader of the Conservative Party, Ian Smith revealing his deep intellectual abilities. “Britain needs a government that understands that more people are left behind when more people are held back. It needs a government that stands back in order for its people to step forward” Times (14 May). Eh?

Another market triumph

Socialists are always being told how wonderful the market system of capitalism is by its supporters, but how do they defend the following? “The catastrophic collapse of the coffee prices – at a 100 year low in real terms – is forcing Latin American farmers to grow coca, the plant from which cocaine is made. Mounting evidence that Peruvian farmers in particular are turning to cocaine to escape from poverty will be presented by Oxfam tomorrow in a crisis meeting of World Bank and European Union officials together with banks, traders and representatives from the 25 million people who depend on coffee production for their livelihood” Observer (18 May).

Central America: which way to capitalism? (1985-86)

From the Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist

In the 50s and 60s the US moved to counter what it saw as a trend toward the establishment of left-wing "third-world" governments in its own backyard by installing military or client dictatorships (wherever the Marines could invent a pretext for landing), most notoriously in Guatemala where the Arbenz government, backed by an increasingly active popular movement, threatened to reproduce the Labor and Social Democratic backlash that had occurred in postwar Europe.

This preventive action, however, was not purely negative in scope but corresponded to a program of economic development which, it was claimed, would do for Latin America what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe. Since this involved increased regimentation generally, it was thought that creating or backing client dictatorships where necessary would guarantee a suitable environment for investing capital.

The "Marshall Plan" for Central America and the Caribbean had consisted, in consequence, of a series of timely strategic "surgical strikes", so that the unsuspecting workers (as in Guatemala in 1954 for instance, where they were otherwise too weak and isolated even to sustain their own radical reformism at that date) were bloodied up and hunted down before they knew what had hit them. Ever since then, US action in the area has been aimed at extending and developing its forcibly imposed discipline, invented for the sake of depressing the exchange-value of human life to otherwise un-maintainably low levels.

On the face of it, the local capitalists in certain parts of Latin America have become increasingly dissatisfied with what they have come to regard as the dead-end development policy of the multinationals; their position is, in effect, that the latter have "mismanaged" economic growth in somehow caused it to be mismanaged.

As the multinationals extended their investments, local industry nourished within a limited context of import substitution. This worked will enough as far as it went, but the focus of investment was not production: it was rather international exchange, and — like the old Mercantilist System — it was oriented toward increasing local foreign exchange reserves rather than generating new value.

As the heat from the reformist opposition became here and there became gradually more intense, it became necessary in the late 60s and early 70s for the US to fortify the bulwarks with a new variety of dictatorship whose legitimacy was virtually non-existent. The sunbelt investors from the US wanted to make one last effort to plunder the locals (capitalists with the support of workers in "mass organizations") before the wrath of the latter finally boiled over.

It was in fact the period of overhasty expansion in the 50s and 60s that brought on the faltering of growth in the late 60s and the financial crisis of the later 70s. The international debt crisis thus links up with the popular opposition in Central America, since it revolves precisely around the funding of the capitalization process. “Reformists”, in this context, are held to be those who favor minor or even major alterations in the way in which the multinationals should be allowed to do business, while those who seek to restrict they way in which capital is accumulated enjoy a reputation for being “revolutionaries”.

Guatemala and El Salvador: unstable Coffee Republics

Guatemalan capitalism as it emerged from the Fascist Decade in the 20s made its bed mostly on coffee beans (and somewhat on bananas), as in El Salvador. (The Central American states received the sobriquet of "banana republics" primarily through their association with the United Fruit Company, one of the "modernizers".) The greater social backwardness of Guatemala, however, caused it to miss out on the land-oriented paroxysms which savaged the workers and peasants of El Salvador in the 30s. The Arevalo and Arbenz regimes in Guatemala (1945-54) were on the other hand notable for setting a precedent of constitutional democracy in the region; just at the time when Labor and Social Democrats in Europe were capitalizing on working class weariness with wartime hardships. (The Costa Rican capitalist class struck early and thoroughly in the same period, abolishing the army altogether, earning themselves the nickname of "the Latin Switzerland".) Thus, despite its relatively backward social organization, Guatemala did experience an echo of Labor reformism in the postwar decade.

The coffee oligarchy of Guatemala took this very ill. By 1954 it was ready to kick over the traces and "to liberate the nation". With the Dulles boys in Washington masterminding a combined diplomatic, propaganda and military offensive, the reformers were easily outmaneuvred and overthrown in July of that year.

Subsequently, however, the coffee barons discovered they had called in the United States only to leap, by the end of the 60s, from the political frying pan into the economic fire: the US had lent its support, not to promote their tranquility, but the growth of industrial manufactures (thereby serving its own convenience) — an assist which could only finish by leaving coffee production further and further behind in the preoccupations of the state. To accomplish this, the US government pursued a policy of regional "self-enrichment" and diversification, "integrating" the region's economies (the self-styled "Central American Common Market"), encouraging import substitution and blocking the spontaneous upgrading of labor-power throughout the regional economy. This process the coffee barons at first mistook for an identification with their interests. Once the blood of the working-class and peasant corpses was good and congealed, however, Washington unceremoniously thrust them aside and the rightwing "National Liberation Movement" (MLN) — which had done the dirty work and built up a political machine in the eastern part of the country — found itself, by the early 70s, a humiliated opposition party within its own regime. And now Guatemala's generals have cut themselves into a very large slice of the profit pie indeed, to the intense annoyance of their fellow capitalists.

It is this general situation of pell-mell accumulation, rather than a supposed structural dependence of Guatemalan capital on an imperialist metropolis ruled by finance capitalists, that explains the endemic instability of Guatemala's ruling class.

The same thing could also be said for El Salvador. In the post-war years, a "modernizing" sector of the coffee exporters and other commercial interests pulled off a palace revolution and installed its own regime in place of the blood-soaked Martinez dictatorship. In this we have what there was of El Salvador's "social-democratic" period, which in the developed economies was characterized by a surge of working-class opinion in favor of more or less broad reforms. In this case, the initiative came from the capitalist class but was supported by the working-class organizations (tiny and persecuted as they were). The fact that circulating capital was mostly tied up in agriculture, that only an exiguous portion of it went to wages in industry, and that it was still mostly tied to fixed capital invested in agriculture, is what accounts for the focus of this initiative on the reform-minded section of the capitalist class rather than on a European-style labor movement.

In terms of social organization, El Salvador in fact came closer than Guatemala to being already "modernized", in that its capitalist class had systematically created Central America's most proletarianized economy — even if it was only for the sake of coffee.

But recently, since the 1979 coup, it has dawned on the coffee magnates that Washington did not offer to give them a hand out of altruism in their emaciated war against the specter of "communism". By the March 1982 elections, the struggle had clearly ceased to be a mere question of a coffee aristocracy clinging tenaciously to its privileged position. Washington at length had decided that condoning extreme right positions was now a liability and definitely cut the coffee oligarchy adrift to face the rigors of "modernization".

The coffee planters have thus acquired the stigma of the greater evil, from the vantage point of international capital. Big business in the US has not changed its tune and decided that what El Salvador needs is a good dose of old-fashioned moderation. It has on the contrary merely revised its criterion of what kind of economic development it thinks would deliver its investments the most effectively from the immediate threat of expropriation.

The structural instability of the capitalist class in both Guatemala and El Salvador demonstrates in microcosm a formative or transitional stage of economic development; and the opposition's allegation of corruption and mismanagement on the part of the governing section of the ruling class acts itself as a catalyst in bringing that transition about: nationalism will never be more than the handmaiden of profit.

The present crisis — which, in the tradition of all great social revolutions, has degenerated to the point where rival factions are now scrambling to get control of the government's budget and so gain the controlling share in shaping the state's economic policy — can thus be explained entirely in terms of profit. From a socialist point of view, its outcome cannot be a revolution resulting in the introduction of common ownership of the means of production, however democratic its ideology may be.

Nicaragua and the class of latent capitalists

The main capitalist opposition in Central America to corporate dominance over the local economy comes, not as we might naively expect, from the existing capitalist class — the official bourgeoisie (the one which is presently constituted and which acts out its role on the stage of world history). It comes chiefly from the concealed capitalist class — the one which favors state-managed capital accumulation on the pretext that this will actually benefit the working class and (what little may remain of) the peasantry.

This class of latent capitalists is none other than the self-styled revolutionary left, most prominently the Leninists, but not by any means those of them who have served as such excellent bull's-eyes for the Reagan administration's target practice. (Moscow-oriented "Communist" parties in Central America — since the massacres of the 30s — have shown themselves incapable, on the whole, of forming more than a loyal opposition bound hand and foot to the status quo, a sort of left-wing Christian Democracy.) There is, in any case, a very definite tendency for the left to nationalize the accumulation of capital conceptually, before any actual question of a transfer of power arises.

A revolution supposedly carried out on behalf of a working class which does not form even a substantial minority of the population, as in a substantial part of the "third world" today (though not so much in Central America), cannot possibly be anti-capitalist. If the workers (wage earners plus professionals and any others who work for someone else) do not make up the majority, then neither can industrial capitalism form the basis of the state. Since the first order of business of a revolution in a state which is still pre-capitalist is necessarily the establishment of a capitalist economy it is nothing if not a pro-capitalist revolution: in an historical context of undeveloped capitalist production, such movements appear as anti-liberal revolutions. One of the warts of Leninism is precisely its confusion of the concepts of "liberalism" and "capitalism".

Capitalism, regardless of its degree of development, is any social system in which the bulk of social wealth is produced for exchange on the market at a profit, conducted through the payment of wages. So long as it observes this basic condition, it may assume any form or character whatever. If this implies totally reorganizing the personnel roster of the accumulators, then so be it! If the state must step in and directly manage all phases and facets of the economy, then that's how it must be! Capital does not care what its administrators look like: it seeks only to reproduce itself in ever-growing measure through the well-known mechanisms of accumulation.

Who makes such revolutions but those who intend to accumulate capital themselves? A minority political party heading a minority working class is itself the nucleus of a potential stratum of accumulators. Capital is equally well served by either sort of lackey. The full transfer of state power to such jerry-built ruling classes is indeed rare — or more precisely, it is an extremely complex event which does not take place most of the time. It is an example of the fortunes of an ideology, not of revolutionary socialist class consciousness.

The revolution in Nicaragua is an interesting study in Leninist doubletalk. Comparing Nicaragua with Guatemala and El Salvador, we note its relatively lesser degree of advancement at the time of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. That is to say, Nicaragua was still more backward than El Salvador, where a civil war is now underway, yet its neo-capitalist revolution has already been successfully begun, while in Guatemala class conflict has yet to break out into open civil war. What explains this disparity?

A major factor in favour of the Sandinistas, certainly, was the very identification of primitive accumulation — vested as it was in the coffee barons — with a concrete clique of individuals (the clan of the Somozas backed by the United States). More decisive, however, was the extreme disgruntlement of the Nicaraguan capitalist class as a whole.

The Sandinistas are attempting to displace the original crew of black sheep with a group that will be more interested in keeping surplus value within Nicaragua. However, "limiting the intervention of the bourgeoisie in the government" — which is their self-attributed objective — is nothing but a collection of buzzwords, since none of them is seriously proposing to limit the role of capital accumulation in formulating government policy. The question revolves entirely around who will accumulate capital, and for what reasons. The Sandinistas thus represent the left wing of the capitalist class, itching to get on with the business of totally converting over to pure state capitalism.

A member of the Sandinistas' National Direction is quoted as saying that, now that they have control of the banks, they have "surrounded the bourgeoisie" (quoted by Roger Burbach in "Nicaragua: El Curso de la revolución". Revista Mensuel/Monthly Review, July 1980). This is a highly ironic remark, in view of the fact that one group of capitalists (the nascent state capitalists) is saying that about the other (the official bourgeoisie). It also illustrates the Leninist belief that the concentration of finance capital is somehow different from the accumulation of capital in general. What is definitely not being encircled, however, is the function of capital accumulating itself. A society of continuing wage-slavery is the fatal economic issue of the Sandinista revolution, given that the institution of production for profit remains sacred.

If wages as the basis of capital accumulation (through the production of surplus value) are not abolished, via the introduction of common ownership of the means of production, it is utterly specious to distinguish '"reformism" and "the revolutionary process". It is all reformism until society no longer depends on the possession of money as a prerequisite for obtaining goods and services.

Throughout all the vicissitudes of the "revolutionary process", none of the "revolutionary" parties — even the most radical — apparently would would dream of abandoning commodity exchange and its inevitable consequence, production for profit. They confine themselves without exception to squabbling over the right to direct this process (as in El Salvador), with one position favoring total state capitalism — eventually and an opposite position favoring a minimal state presence in the economy (or so they say). An "authentically socialist perspective" (a widespread demand for common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production) does not figure in any of their programs.

Ron Elbert

Voice From The Back: Polluting for profit (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Polluting for profit

The major problems of pollution are caused by the excessive burning of fossil fuels, everyone except the coal and oil lobby agrees. There are alternatives such as wind and solar power; so why aren’t they being developed at the same rate as fossil fuel usage? Simple really. “At present wind power costs between 1.9 and 3.1p a unit, while solar is more than 20p. Conventional generated power sells for between l.1p and 1.3p.” Observer (25 August). Inside a socialist society we won’t be polluting the earth if we have an alternative, but then we would not be producing wealth to make a handful rich but to satisfy human need.

DIY hanging

Clive Fairweather, the outgoing HM Inspector for prisons in Scotland had some figures on suicides in prison that might cheer the “hang-’em, flog-’em” brigade but should chill any compassionate human being. Think of the despair that lies behind a young man taking his own life. Another indictment of the inhumanity of capitalism. “Mr Fairweather told his audience that in the eight years he had been chief inspector of prisons, 170 prisoners had died, yet between 1900 and 1963, only 35 were executed by hanging. 'Bring back hanging? It’s DIY hanging at eight times the rate these days, for our young in prison', he said.” Herald (4 September).

The close circuit society

In the Guardian of 7 September there was a supplement on surveillance in Britain today. It was pretty scary stuff and shows how capitalism is becoming more and more restrictive . “From the moment a worker logs on in the morning to the moment they shut down at night, corporate information *technology departments can watch each and every action they make — which keys they press, which websites they visit, what emails they receive and send . . . Security procedures such as swipe cards on entrances also allow detailed following of employees — if management wants to — of how much time is spent in which parts of a building and, in some workplaces, with cards required for entry to workplace toilets.”

Exporting destruction

As the US and UK leaders claim an attack on Iraq is justified because that country has stocks of “mass destruction weapons” it is worthwhile noting where Iraq was obtaining these weapons from. Surprise, surprise, from the US and the UK. “Reports by the US Senate’s committee on banking, housing and urban affairs — which oversees American export policy — reveal that the US under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr. sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia . . . Classified US Defence Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxin, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxin can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.” Sunday Herald (8 September).

The Voice of America?

Ann Coulter, an American journalist and broadcaster has written a book “Slander” containing outrageous right wing views. It is subtitled “Liberal Lies About The American Right” In her column in the National Review she put forward her solution to the Middle East problem, quoted in the Sunday Herald Magazine (8 September): “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Voice of America?, let’s hope not; though her book does currently top the New York [Times]  bestsellers list.

Oxfam’s solution to famine

Have you ever given money to Oxfam for them to help out by distributing food during some famine? If so, you may well be surprised by the following news item: "British charity Oxfam today launched a 'coffee rescue plan' urging political and business leaders to destroy surplus stocks and guarantee a fair price for farmers" (Guardian, 19 September).

Oxfam's original name was the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief but it later branched out into being a reformist campaigning organisation, working within the context of capitalism. We have always argued that those who set out to reform capitalism end up accepting its logic. This latest episode proves this point up to the hilt. Capitalism periodically produces crises where "too much" food\ has been produced, a crisis of plenty amidst poverty. It solves such crises) not by distributing the plenty to the poor (that would be against its logic and undermine profits), but by destroying the plenty. This has been a classic illustration of the socialist case against capitalism: that it is a system of production for profit rather than to satisfy human needs. Now OXFAM, an organisation set up to try to distribute a bit of the plenty to some of the poor, has come round to the capitalist solution: destroy the food! Remember that next time they shake a collection tin under your nose.

Gaspers (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Czechoslovakia to create an internal money market (Financial Times, 24 May 1967).

“We will not unite with people whose aim is our disruption” (Draft resolution for conference of the Young Communist League).

“The Churches could make a great contribution to swing the African from his traditional attitude towards labour, and to teach him to work harder and to work regularly, the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, Mr. Botha, said … ‘I think that in this connection the Churches can be of great help, and that is, when rendering spiritual services, they must stress the value of sustained labour. In fact, it should be done in respect of the Whites as well…’ ” (Star, Johannesburg, 31 March 1967).

“Very regrettably a few Communist Trotskyites in certain sectors of our industry continue to mislead the good craftsmen and operatives … These Trotskyites, professional militants and other extremists whose only aim is disruption and to mislead good honest workers, are shockers” (Frank Taylor, chief of the Taylor Woodrow group in his annual report to shareholders, 17 May 1967).

“One man—one vote”, he said, would lead the country to a state of complete and utter chaos. A street sweeper would have as much say in running the country as the most brilliant and educated person. “No one could believe this to be right, “he added (Ian Smith, reported in Financial Times, 23 May 1967).

The Government’s policies have cut the standard of living of a great many workers. (The Observer—28.5.61).

… conquest is not internationally accepted as the way of changing frontiers (The Times—7.6.67).

Coffee seedlings burned

“Over 300.000 coffee seedlings were uprooted and burned on a nursery near Nairobi today as the first step in the Agriculture Ministry’s plan to restrict coffee production.

Mr. G. R. Medforth, the Kenya Coffee Board’s chief inspector, who supervised the burning, said about one million — or 20 per cent — of the plants in nurseries throughout the country were surplus and would be burned. Growers would get compensation.” The Times, 25.5.67.

Guns and coffee in El Salvador (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the defeat of the American-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979, the American ruling class has been concerned that the testing-ground for the “domino” theory would shift from Southeast Asia to its own backyard, Central America. Would Guatemala and El Salvador be the next countries to instal new rulers who were less well-disposed towards the US? In El Salvador, in particular, massive American military aid is being used to maintain in power a ferociously repressive junta.

Since the late nineteenth century, El Salvador has been a leading coffee grower and exporter. In the 1880s, with the help of conveniently passed laws, Indian communities were uprooted from their land and large coffee plantations were formed. Many former peasants became seasonal workers on the coffee estates, able to find employment only between November and March. Since 1930, there has been much urban industrial development, largely in the form of capital-intensive export industries owned by US corporations such as Exxon, Texaco and Westinghouse Electric. But El Salvador remains a predominantly agricultural country.

It is also a land of great poverty and inequality. The entire economy — agriculture, finance, industry — is dominated by a tiny elite of fourteen families. Two per cent of the population controls over sixty per cent of the cultivable land. At the other extreme, only one peasant family in twenty owns enough land to support themselves, while on 1974 figures over forty per cent of urban wage-workers were earning less than the legal minimum of around five pounds a week. About half of El Salvador’s infants die of malnutrition or related ailments before their first birthday. Such is the status quo the American government is defending, to the tune of ten million dollars in 1980-1.

For half a century El Salvador has been ruled by one military dictatorship after another. In 1930, in the midst of the world depression, the candidate of the reformist Labour Party was elected President, only to be overthrown by the army in the following year. In 1932, after the so-called Communist Party had won some local elections, the generals refused to recognise the result and a large-scale peasant uprising took place. It was put down brutally: between twenty and thirty thousand people were killed (equal to between one and two per cent of the total population!). Since then, the government has been in the possession of a series of different factions of the army and the fourteen families, with some mock elections but no political democracy. Since 1960, many peasants have been won to support of the the regime in power by means of a rural paramilitary body known as the National Democratic Organisation, or ORDEN. Its members were helped to avoid the worst poverty by means of such “favours” as special credit terms, preference in employment, or extra health care. ORDEN members acted as informers against suspected subversives in the villages. Thus many potential opponents were recruited as bulwarks of the government.

The Christian Democrat Party was founded in I960. In 1972 their presidential candidate was deprived of electoral victory by yet another army coup. By this time, guerrilla organisations were being formed in the countryside, aimed at resisting ORDEN and, in the long run, at taking over the government themselves. Besides ORDEN, there are other pro-regime terrorist groups ranged against the guerrillas. In addition, there is a veritable plethora of “left-wing” opposition groupings of various kinds, religious, political, trade-union, student. Since April 1980, these have come together in the Revolutinary Democratic Front (FDR).

The current Salvadoran government came to power in a coup in October 1979, when the Christian Democrats and a section of the army overthrew the existing military regime. The new junta promised “radical reforms”, and set up a cabinet involving civilian ministers. However, it immediately proclaimed a state of emergency and banned meetings of more than three people. Clearly the junta was not even superficially different from—let alone better than—the outright military dictatorships that preceded it. By the end of 1979, the junta w.as openly backing its own terrorist organisations. In 1980 El Salvador entered a period of civil war. On the one side were the army and the other state-run terrorists (supported and trained by the Americans) and on the other the guerrillas, backed by opposition movements and, supposedly, supplied with arms by Cuba. In the first nine months of 1980 alone, five thousand Salvadorans were killed in the fighting.

What are the two sides fighting for? The government and the army are defending the existing order and the interests of the present ruling élite, the Salvadoran capitalist class, and the American companies who own much of Salvadoran industry. The American military aid is designed to protect the massive profits of these US companies, and to defend America’s strategic interests in Central America. The guerrillas are a nationalist movement, fighting against United States control of the Salvadoran economy and government, and aiming to establish Salvadoran state capitalism. This is apparent from an examination of the “Programmatic Platform of the Revolutionary Democratic Government”, issued in February 1980 by the Revolutionary Coordinating Committee of the Masses, the umbrella grouping of guerrilla organisations.

The platform calls for widespread nationalisation of the banking and finance system, of foreign trade, of electricity distribution, of petroleum refining. It is stated, though, that “None of this will affect small or medium-sized private businesses, which will be given all kinds of stimulus and support in the various branches of the national economy”. There will be an agrarian reform, and the tax system will supposedly be transformed “so that tax payments no longer fall upon the workers”. (As taxes are a burden only on the capitalist class anyway, this transformation is difficult to envisage.) There will be wage regulation, price controls, increased social services, no unemployment . . . It all sounds quite impressive, till you realise that you’ve heard it all before from politicians elsewhere, and that the supposed benefits of nationalisation never quite permeate to the workers. State-run enterprises will still be concerned with making a profit and the platform admits as much: “the state will receive substantial income from the activity of the nationalised sector of the economy”. They will still be subject to the ups and downs of the world markets, in coffee for instance. As elsewhere, nationalised industries will be concerned to keep profits up by keeping wages down, and to discharge workers when what they produce cannot be sold profitably.

The workers and peasants of HI Salvador have nothing to gain by supporting the opposition groups or guerrillas, who will simply become their new rulers and exploiters. The platform we have discussed aims at no radical transformation of society: it envisages the continuation and further development of capitalism in El Salvador, a society of haves and have-nots. The change will be in the personnel of the ruling class, and a change from private to predominantly state capitalism. And that makes no difference to anyone but the capitalists themselves.

Paul Bennett

Voice From the Back: ‘Son, here’s a million dollars. Don’t lose it.' (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quote

“The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said ‘Son, here’s a million dollars. Don’t lose it.'” Larry Niven.

In God they trust

The world’s second largest chemical, pharmaceutical and genetic engineering conglomerate, with a turnover of more than £60 billion a year, has turned to revivalist religion to rally senior management under pressure from consumers to be socially responsible. Novartis, a recent merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz, which owns, among other things, Ovaltine, has commissioned a corporate hymn called the Science of Life. It includes refrains, hip-hop and rap. Guardian, 13 November.

“Prison works”

One in five prisoners tested positively for drugs during random tests, according to government figures. A total of 13,797 inmates in England and Wales were found to have taken drugs following random tests during 1996-97, junior Home Office minister, George Howarth said in a written Commons reply. Evening Mail, 10 December.

Tell it like it is

Some capitalists understand their system better than others or are more honest about it. George Soros, who made fortunes speculating in currency markets, does not regard capitalism as a stable or self-regulating system. In an interview last year, which has become particularly relevant now, he said: “Markets can move in unexpected ways and become chaotic. I’m afraid that the prevailing view, which is one of extending the market mechanism to all domains, has the potential of destroying society. Unless we review our concept of markets, our understanding of markets, they will collapse, because we are creating global markets, global financial markets, without understanding their true nature. We have this false theory that markets, left to their own devices, tend towards equilibrium.” Speaking of market fluctuations, he said that if they become too large, “you can have breakdown. It will come through political and eventually military events, rather than events merely in the financial markets”.

Owners of property

There are already plans to sell of £1.2 billion of NHS land and buildings in the next five years. Trust currently own £3 billion of land assets and £15 billion of buildings and fittings. Mail on Sunday, 7 December.

The other coffee story

The maker of Nescafé has taken to installing cubicles inside Russian churches from which to deliver congratulatory coffee sets to newlyweds as soon as they walk back down the aisle. Nestlé employees have already presented 17,000 couples with a large jar of instant coffee and two red mugs wishing them “health, happiness and hot love”.

Class conflict direct

Associated British Ports yesterday attempted to deflect shareholder hostility by announcing 150 job cuts designed to reduce costs by £5 million a year. Guardian, 11 December.

Class conflict obscured

Employee share-ownership schemes are taking off again for the first time since the late Eighties. Last week British Airways announced it will extend the scheme it offers UK workers to staff around the world . . . (Financial Mail on Sunday, 18 January). Stuart Bailey, corporate business consultant with Abbey National says . . . “People now see that the aims of workers and shareholders are increasingly similar.”

Honours amongst thieves

For an outspoken republican and a non-Catholic, a papal knighthood must come as a surprise. But media baron Rupert Murdoch is to receive just such an honour from the Pope. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles announced that the Australian-born mogul will be entitled to style himself a Knight of the Order of St Gregory . . . [A] spokesman for the Archdiocese said Pope John Paul II bestows the title on people of “unblemished character” and those who have “promoted the interests of society, the Church and the Holy See” [including those who have] made large donations to Catholic institutions, according to the announcement in the Los Angeles Times.

Quote

“Confidence is the bedrock of all capitalism.” Peter Morgan, commenting on the South Korean economic crisis on BBC Television News, 23 December.

Radical treatment necessary

In 1872 Engels demonstrated in three articles gathered together under the title The Housing Question that homelessness was an inescapable feature of capitalism. Everywhere in the world, ever since, wherever capitalism has spread, this has proved to be the case. Now, after years of campaigning and collecting, Shelter has announced in recent newspaper advertisements: “The number of homeless families has almost doubled in the last fifteen years . . .” Surely, this is tantamount to saying that the campaign wages by Shelter has been a failure? If a doctor prescribed a treatment for an ailment which, after fifteen years, was twice as bad, most of us would conclude that the treatment was the wrong one.

Too much food

Across Europe last year, fruit growers were paid £132m–£1.1m in Britain—for crops designated as surplus. A 25-year-old regulation specifies that the surplus has to be disposed of through “approved outlets”. Although these can include disposal for animal feed, the EU favours distribution to charities, old people’s homes and schools. It even offers grants to offset any expense incurred in giving the fruit away. Yet when British fruit growers, largely concentrated in the south of England, applied to the government’s Intervention Board to dispose of 2.3 million kg of apples, two million pears and 13.6 million cauliflowers after last year’s bumper harvest, all went into pig’s swill or were spread on farmland as fertiliser. Scotland on Sunday, 16 November.

From America: The Coffee ‘Rip-off’ and some facts of Life (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Permit me to add my two bits-plus worth to the brouhaha over skyrocketing coffee prices in America.

I worked in coffee warehouses where “working in coffee” can mean anything from “bull gang labour, unloading freight cars of 125-pound sacks of green coffee (two men per sack) to stacking cases of 1-pound tins of ground coffee (prior to the advent of fork-lifting machines) in five and/or seven tiers that reached above the rafters (until a tip that fire inspectors were on the way had bull gangs frantically tearing down the top layers).

In between these extremes were stints at loading empty cans on the track at the top of the packing process; and duty at the spout from which the packer keeps pace, like an “appendage of the machine,” with a steady flow of filled and hermetically sealed 1 lb. tins, pumping them with right foot into a carton held against the spout with left hand while the right hand is making ready another carton from the flattened-out pile beside you, then flipping the filled boxes on to a moving track where they are sealed and borne to waiting hands for stacking. All this time, one weather-eye is kept on the onrushing cans in order to pull dents off the line before they enter the spout, jam the machinery and interfere with production-time; while the other one takes note of the diminishing stock of flattened cartons against the time you dash for replacements, getting back to the post in time to keep the process moving. The “coffee nerves” one is supposed to develop from drinking too much of it are nothing as compared to the shakes one gets from packing it!

This sort of familiarity with coffee does not qualify one to explain the economics behind the $3.00 per-lb. —more or less—that coffee brings today at the supermarket. After all, in those times referred to, top grades of the roasted and ground beans retailed at about 40-cents per lb. while one could be served a cup of it, along with a couple of doughnuts, for a thin dime —when one could afford to spend the dime. After Pearl Harbour and the advent of food (and coffee) rationing, prices did advance although with some controls through a Government agency and the problem of getting enough coffee on the white market was considered by President F. D. Roosevelt. He (a non-coffee drinker) advised us to re-use the grounds from each batch, at least once, before discarding!

Why is coffee produced, in the first place? Are growers and processors motivated by the “consuming public’s” love affair with the brew? No question about it. That factor plays a part only in the sense that it enables them to produce profits. That is what any business is all about so coffee growers and processors should hardly care less if the “consuming public” were to lose its taste for the stuff providing some other popular use might be found for their commodity (perhaps it might serve as a land filler or as a fertilizer). And, given the free enterprise mode of production, how can one argue logically against such a principle? How can one, consistently, argue the case for the profit system yet organize and/or participate in boycotts against rising prices? “The consumer is being ripped-off!” they cream. And they call for volunteers for picket duty in a battle to force one group of industrialists to cease taking advantage of a situation that enables them to corner a larger-than-usual share of the profits. They forget that the first duty of an industry is to its owners, or stock-holders and that fat years afford opportunity to recoup from lean years.

Now this is not to turn a cold shoulder to the plight of those who can hardly, if at all, make ends meet as it is without more price-gouging by those who own and control coffee. But boycotts of such items are not organized, generally, by those who cannot afford the high prices. They are the brain children of those who delight in bragging about their large expenditures, trips abroad, etc. Most of us are too busy getting by without joining in such movements. Wage-working people do gripe about prices, search for bargains, frequently strike for higher pay, and even more frequently look to moonlighting to compensate for rising costs of their necessities. All of which does not mean that coffee tycoons, or any other variety, can continue to raise prices at will. There is that other Nemesis that thwarts such a hope—the competition among themselves for a larger share of the market that, willy nilly, eventually leads to a drop in prices.

It should be plain, then, that—like it or not—our system is operating normally, and taking advantage of opportunities to maximize profits is in harmony with sound economics. Would the outraged ones champion a totally different social system than any now existing anywhere, production solely for use rather than for sale on a market with view to profit? Don’t all speak at once!

Harry Morrison

(WSP, Boston)

Jottings. (1922)

The Jottings Column from the January 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was calculated that Christmas found us with between 6 and 7 millions within the circle of unemployment. Over three million pounds a week are being expended in some form of relief or other.

There appears to be a great diversity of opinion regarding the adequacy of the amount of relief paid. Some believe, and say, the workless are not getting enough. Others believe, and say, they are getting too much. Many people who happen for the time being to be enjoying a comparatively comfortable standard of life, object to the reiteration by the Socialist of the ugly facts of life, saying that, after all, it is only a difference in the point of view.

They mean that if the Socialist would only keep his mouth shut, things would go along much more quietly. The "poor" would be much more content if left alone. But it is not in accord with the principles of a Socialist to go about with his eyes and mouth shut. He is not going to be quiet about anything that affects the existence of the class to which he belongs. The "poor " don't make half the noise they ought to. But it is something more than that, even. The Socialist presents facts, and interprets those facts by the application of a scientific method. When this is done, it is not a question of a point of view at all, but the acceptance of proved testimony. If those facts are of a damaging nature to some people, they will reject them and conveniently adopt a "point of view."

But this so-called point of view itself is determined largely by the economic conditions under which the individual happens to be living. The question of relative security, for instance. Whilst hunger and poverty of themselves will not make a person into a Socialist, they will yet enable him to distinguish between what might be termed a good time and a rotten one.

Everything is relative—we should go into ecstasies if we were suddenly rewarded with another ten shillings a week, believing we could work wonders with it. And so the Governor of South Australia is resigning his job because he finds his wage of £4,000 a year barely suffices to make ends meet.

--0--

If the assurances of our rulers and their working class supporters had been borne out we should now be living in a land abounding in plenty, and with nothing to mar our happiness. What is the actual state ? Does it need describing ? Is not every one of us familiar with it—to our sorrow? It is quite true that a great deal of the actual condition is purposely camouflaged so that the intense misery shall not be apparent.

The capitalists are suffering, too, some of them—not physically like we are, but from a shortage of trade. For trade means exploitation, and exploitation means profits.

Singularly enough, the only solution they can offer lies in a steady lowering of the standard of life and the restoration of a competitive selling capacity in the world's markets by a reduction in the price of labour-power.

--0--

One of the results of the capitalists' way of running the world is seen in the present plight of Brazil.

Brazil did not, of course, participate actively in the war, but is, nevertheless, as much a sufferer as anyone else. Indeed, this applies to most countries, whether they were belligerents or not. It shows that the capitalist system is interdependent; to be successful all its parts must work smoothly— for the capitalist.

If any disturbance arises within the system, whether it be a financial crisis in peace time, or a war on a big scale, its effects are far-reaching.

The workers, being already poor, are the first to suffer : that is, their sufferings are increased—and they don't know why.

Primarily, in a system like the present, profits is the first and last thing that matters. It is the only precept the capitalist is guided by: sacred to him as furnishing the initiative which he is prone to regard as the driving force in a capitalist-ridden world.

Before the war Germany imported large quantities of coffee from Brazil. Brazil sold coffee to Germany, not because the Germans were fond of coffee, but because it was profitable to do so. Now, Germany is buying no coffee, not because she doesn't want it, but because she hasn't the money to pay for it, and leave the Brazilian planters and exporters with a profit. No profit—no coffee. Brazil retains the coffee, and is in consequence impoverished, with very little money wherewith to buy goods from other countries.

Clearly the lesson is shown : Abolish the system of production only for profits, with its basis of slavery and economic distress, and substitute one of production for use with universal security

--0--

In associating itself with any measure in which the master class is interested, the Labour Party betrays the fact that it considers there are some points regarding the administration of capitalism which are mutually advantageous to workers and capitalists alike. An instance is the support given to the idea of disarmament. The Labour Party considers this to be a question on which organised labour should make itself heard.

According to Mr. J. H. Thomas, at the recent Regional Conference at Derby, the Labour Party would go further than the Washington Conference in the matter of limiting armaments. "When the Labour Party demanded disarmament it meant it to apply on land, and in the air, as well as on sea."

Dear! dear! And who will they "demand " it of ? Everybody knows that the capitalists themselves are the people who will determine what methods of force shall or shall not, prevail. If we find them "limiting" themselves in any particular direction, it is not in response to any "demand," it is because it suits them to do so —in this case because they find the process a rather expensive one.

Questions of disarmament are not working class questions. It may be true, as our "leaders" point out, that millions are being spent on improving the fighting machinery, but it concerns us not in the least.

The worker is robbed, once and for all, at the point of production—that is, in the workshop. When he gets his packet at the week-end, he has got all that is coming to him—he has been skinned to the limit. What happens to the wealth he has been robbed of after he has drawn his pay can make not one iota of difference to his position. The main point is—he hasn't got it. Whether his boss buys cigars or battleships with the money, whether he buys a new car for his wife, or a string of pearls for his mistress, it is all the same—to us.

Armaments, wars, unemployment and poverty are only features of capitalism. They should not be isolated, and efforts concentrated on their abolition, because that is impossible while the system lasts.

The Socialist does not pick out one or two disagreeable things which exist, and concentrate all his energies in "demanding " of those who are responsible for their existence that they shall forthwith abolish them, for that would be foolish. While the Labour Party is organising to "demand" changes within the capitalist system, the Socialist Party is organising to overthrow 
the system. There's the difference.

Tom Sala

Food burners at work again (1965)

From the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since socialists first appeared and made the case for abolishing capitalism, they have had to contend with opponents voicing variations on the common theme of retaining that system. The different groups did not admit or always realise that they were at one in defending capitalism, and outwardly they did not even seem to be united. There were those who said that capitalism would be quite satisfactory if only governments would stop interfering and impeding—we have a relic still in Mr. Enoch Powell. Others thought that it would work well if people would mend their ways and not be greedy. This group is always with us. And those who thought that the crying need is for better or wiser men at the helm of state — Liberals or Labour when the government is Conservative and Liberal and Conservative when the government is Labour. And those who believe that the system is essentially sound but that its abuses must be tackled as they show themselves in the light of new ideas and through new acts of Parliament. Actually this last category takes in almost all those who in practice hinder the movement to Socialism, including that most ineffectual band who for a century have been saying that Socialism is absolutely necessary but not just now, not until this or that evil has been removed.

All of these reformers agree with each other in rejecting the Socialist argument that we can and should have a social system which will have no place for prices, wages, profits etc. They say that the human race cannot do without these things, and in any event has no need to waste time trying to do so because there is nothing wrong with them in principle, only with the way they are used. So at each General Election we start a new round of schemes supposed to rid us of worries about prices, wages, strikes, monopolies and so on.

And each succeeding election finds things just the same except that the government and opposition may have changed places.

Just at the moment it is prices which occupy pride of place in the list of public complaints.

The most common complaint is that prices are “too high” and everybody blames everybody else for it. (Not least the newspapers which have put up their own prices during the past 12 months). All the complainers agree that somebody ought to do something about it, without explaining exactly what should be done and what level of prices would be regarded as just the right one.

The very rash might rush in and say that the right level is the lowest level but in the midst of the hullabaloo about prices that are too high there are some agonised cries about prices that are too low.

There are several aspects of the problem of prices. First there are the economic laws which explain why different articles have different prices—why an ounce of gold has a higher price than the same weight of silver, and lead a higher price than coal. Basically this is explained by the amount of human labour necessary for the prediction of each kind of article.

Then there are the laws which explain the upward or downward movements of the price level as a whole—why for example the general price level here is three or more times what it was in 1938, or why the price level fell heavily and continually for 10 years or more in the Nineteen twenties and thirties.

Also there are the upward and downward movements of the price of any article which came under the head of fluctuations due to variations in supply and demand. It is these fluctuations that concern us here.

If the supply of an article falls in relation to "demand" prices will go up; and if demand falls in relation to supply they will go down. It works against the background that everyone wants high prices for what he sells and low prices for what he buys and will take advantage of any circumstances which help him to get what he wants. Greedy and anti-social? Maybe, but that is what capitalism is and how it works, and the working of capitalism needs price fluctuations, as a corrective for over and under supply in relation to the demand of the market.

Governments do from time to time imagine they can have a price system without its “abuses": they try to control and reduce prices irrespective of the market conditions, only to find that they have created a “black market."

The people who want a price system but do not want to let it operate are constantly being shocked by demonstrations of the system functioning normally.

So it was that between the wars we were told how iniquitous it was that with millions of people in want of food, wheat was being burned. It was burned because there was so much more than the market would absorb that its price had fallen to unprofitable levels. The same was true of coffee and some other commodities. From a human standpoint of course it was iniquitous but how else can capitalism, which produces for the market, operate except in terms of the market ?

An alternative to actual destruction is to let the depressed price have direct effect by ruining the producers and thus reducing production. Another it to hold the surplus off the market as has happened with coffee, wheat and other products when the interests concerned are sufficiently influential to get governments to intervene and bear the cost—as in U.S.A.

A “simple” solution that is suggested is for governments to give away the surplus, but this aggravates the problem since it both depresses prices and deprives other would-be sellers of a market.

The one thing that all the reformers agreed on was that destruction and restriction, and unemployed men and resources, must never again be allowed to happen. Expansion and abundance were on the banners and Keynes the prophet.

But capitalism has not changed. Though, as the authorities agree, the number of malnourished people in the world is increasing, burning and restriction are still with us. Last Autumn it was reported from Southern Rhodesia that, following a bumper tobacco crop and falling prices a scheme for restricting production had been adopted. The same wind struck Australia and some 200 tons of good tobacco were burned near Brisbane in December last.

Cocoa too has run into trouble. Too much has been produced for the demands of the market and in November last the six countries in the Cocoa Producers Alliance, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Togo decided to destroy cocoa stocks to help keep up the price. The following was reported by the Times on 12th December from Accra:

  Sir Tsibu Darku, the Chairman of Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Board, today put the torch to about 500 tons of cocoa which went up in flames hear here. He said the bonfire was the first of a series which would go on until they had completely destroyed two per cent of Ghana’s basic quota, to give effect to a decision of the alliance of cocoa producing countries.

But a Financial Times correspondent last December doubted if this would be effective—"most dealers feel that far more than the present suggestion of two per cent of the six member’s basic quota should be burnt." He thought they would have to choose between accepting lower prices and restricting production.

This, of course, will not prevent the Financial Times from urging greater production as the right policy for Britain and other countries.

Brazil is one of the cocoa group worried about the “overproduction,” committed to destruction of some of the surplus. In 1943 the Brazilian Government thought to solve its cocoa problem by nationalising the export of cocoa but gave up the idea in 1952.

It was Brazil that was mostly involved in the destruction of coffee before the war. As it is now reported that efforts of coffee producers to keep up prices in a falling market were failing, they may soon again be destroying coffee as well as cocoa.

Next on the list may be bananas. Fierce competition of West Indian banana producers has pronounced what is described in The Times (29th December) as "a collapse of the banana market.”

A spokesman of the Jamaica Banana Board said:

  This is the most calamitous situation the Jamaican banana industry has faced since the war and could be as bad as anything that has ever happened in all our banana history.

These are examples of over supply and calamity through depressed prices. But capitalism is nothing if not varied. The People (10th January 1965) has a lament of the opposite kind. There has recently been a shortage of bricks and some other building materials, with the consequence that building orders are subject to long delays in delivery. The result has been a big emergence of a “black market.” You can get a certain type of brick at £12 10s. a 1,000 if you can wait up to a year. But if you like to pay £20 or more you can get immediate delivery.

What we shall go on getting is the same old complaints, protests, speeches, committees of enquiry and so on. And capitalism's price system will continue to operate in the only way it can until the workers get to understand that there really is a solution, to get rid of the price system along with capitalism of which it is a part.

Edgar Hardcastle

Pathfinders: Blackout in Sudan (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blackout in Sudan

Last month’s BBC Panorama shock exposé of anti-semitism in the Labour Party created quite a stir, but also left a lot of people wondering why the BBC has not chosen to do an equivalent exposé of the rampant and well-documented islamophobia in the Tory Party. Balanced unbiased news reporting, in line with the BBC’s own charter? Corbynistas will be fuming about a stitch-up, and not without reason.

The BBC is probably more balanced when reporting overseas conflicts in which the UK government has no direct interest. BBC’s Africa Eye has provided some decent coverage of the Sudan uprising, including a fascinating video report which, in another kind of stitching, put together a patchwork of over 300 phone videos of the June 3 slaughter in Khartoum, when the military junta’s special forces opened fire on peaceful protesters (‘Sudan’s Livestream Massacre’, BBC News, 12 July ).

The report made the point that, while phones can’t stop bullets, the near-ubiquity of mobile phones means that the world has eyes everywhere, and no junta can keep its massacres a secret anymore. Not that public exposure will necessarily deter a ruthless regime, however in the globalised trading era it’s bad advertising which makes a country look weak and unstable, and will deter foreign investment.

If the military rulers in Sudan expected a massacre to clear the streets and stop the protests, they were right, but not for long. Within a fortnight the protests were back, and bigger than ever. The junta responded by shutting down the internet, forcing protest organisers to rely on text SMS or land-line telephone, a fiddly and expensive business which could reach only a fraction of its target audience. But while the blackout impeded the protesters, it was catastrophic for the Sudanese economy, costing hundreds of millions in lost trade. Was this nevertheless a pyrrhic victory for the junta, the BBC wondered later that month (‘Has an internet blackout killed Sudan’s revolution?’, BBC News, 21 June ). No, as it turned out. In July the military rulers climbed down and acceded to partial civilian rule. The point to take from this is that while modern communications technology is a wonderful force for democratisation, it can always be censored or shut down, and so should not be relied upon. But none of that matters if the courage and determination of workers is strong enough, as in Sudan.

This is your capitalist brain on drugs

Drug firm Pfizer has discovered that its own arthritis treatment drug Enbrel also seems to cut the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 64 percent (New Scientist, 15 June, p7). Great, you might think. Over to Pfizer to start cranking out Enbrel by the container load.

Oh but wait, says Pfizer. Actually, our patent on this is due to expire soon, so we won’t be proceeding with this.

What, you say, you mean you’re not going to make any?

Pfizer shakes its head.

But a 64 percent risk reduction – are you kidding? That blows every other Alzheimer drug out of the water!

Sorry, says Pfizer, no can do. If we don’t make the profit, we don’t make the drug.

But surely you can get your patent extended, you insist. Old drug, new use, it’s been done before.

Yeah well, says Pfizer, we don’t really believe our own data anyway.

Alright, you argue, run proper clinical trials then.

Pfizer bites its lip. Thing is, trials cost, and we’ve all lost a packet on failed clinical trials before. All previous Alzheimer’s trials have failed, which is why all the major drug firms have closed their Alzheimer’s research units. Basically it’s a huge money sink.

Well, you ask in increasing desperation, can’t you get government funding to cover this?

Pfizer smiles. Yeah, good luck with that. Voters want low taxes more than happy granddads.

Well, can’t you release the patent and let another firm make the stuff then?

Pfizer looks shocked. But that wouldn’t be fair – it’s our drug!

Alzheimer’s affects 37 million people worldwide. But capitalism says no.

Why not make a cystic fibrosis drug instead? Drug firm Vertex charges £100,000 a year for the treatment Orkambi, which the NHS won’t pay for, so kids die (New Scientist, 15 June, p9). But because Vertex doesn’t have a valid patent in Argentina, a local firm is producing the drug at the bargain rate of £23,000 pa. Vertex is furious, of course, claiming that their sale price is a fair reflection of the billions they sank into R&D. Meanwhile the parents of kids with cystic fibrosis have been forced to create a ‘buyers club’ in order to buy wholesale and get the cost down further, a move clinicians describe as ‘a desperate act’.

Patents in capitalism are intended to reward and defend intellectual effort and financial investment. But the flip side is that patents also kill people either by setting unaffordable prices or stopping production at source. In socialism you might get the kudos for an invention, but you wouldn’t get a patent.

This is your capitalist brain on dregs

Two bumper harvests in Brazil have flooded the international market with so much coffee that the price farmers can get has plummeted to below $1 a pound (BBC News, 11 July ). Since coffee is a cash crop that farmers sell instead of growing food they could actually eat, when the price hits the floor farmers will turn to other cash crops or else subsistence. Add in the number of farmers also going bust or abandoning farming, and you’re looking at a massive scaling back of future coffee production. Enjoy that cappuccino while you may, because in a few years’ time you might only be able to afford re-boiled dregs. How can a good harvest turn into a disaster? That’s capitalist ‘logic’ for you.

Paddy Shannon