Diary of a Capitalist (1978)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

There has been a lot of ill-founded criticism of Princess Anne’s behaviour on her visit to Norway. She was shown on Norwegian television touring a hospital nursery. The television audience watched as a five-year-old boy "tried to shake hands or get a cuddle from her and was apparently spurned. ‘No cuddle, not even a smile’ was the headline on one newspaper's front page" (Daily Telegraph, 7.11.78). Thousands of people rang the papers expressing their distaste, and suggesting the Princess should go home. Most of them said they could not understand how Princess Anne, herself a mother, could show such coldness to a child.

All these proley protesters are missing the point. Motherhood isn’t the same thing in the capitalist class as it is in the working class (and the Royal Family are in the capitalist class: they have a very large income from investments, apart from their annual State payments). Upper-class mothers still have to bear their children themselves — the workers can't do it for them yet (though these experiments to plant a fertilized human egg from one set of parents into someone’s else’s womb may soon solve that little difficulty): after that, the hard work of bringing the children up is done by the servants. Most upper-class children form what emotional links they are capable of in the circumstances with their Nannies. Take me: I was brought up by my Nanny and a nursemaid. My parents came in most days about four o’clock to sec me having tea in the day nursery: apart from that I saw little of them. When I was a bit older, other servants looked after me and introduced me to blood sports on the estate. As Lord Lovat says in his March Past: a Memoir, just published, the person who first lock him fishing was not anyone in his family, but an "old retainer, the castle lamplighter" (Daily Telegraph, 2.11.78). Then at nine I was sent away to boarding school: prep school till thirteen, public school till eighteen. There I was given a thorough training in how to order other people about, which is the role in life of a member of the upper class. (At the same time the state schools very properly teach the workers’ children the mirror image of that: how to conduct themselves at the bottom of the pile, and how to obey those above them. As the Daily Telegraph leader said on October 27, the teachers' power to cane their pupils is a necessary "supplement to a whole system of ritual and convention designed to instil the notion of hierarchy and predispose the young to habitual obedience".)

The result of this upbringing is to implant in the future members of the upper class the necessary harsh, tough, unsentimental character which one must have to be a ruler in class-divided society. Kindness, pity, sympathy, humanity — all these would be a handicap to us in doing our job: we can leave all that to the workers.

Monday

Shopping today for furniture for my new house. Got a couple of nice armchairs for £305 each, and a sofa for £1070, all from Harrods (Observer, 15.10.78).

Tuesday

Lord Brooke is letting the side down. He is the present descendant of the Greville family, who have owned Warwick Castle since 1604. The Fulke Greville of that time, who was a rich man in Warwickshire. mainly through the fortunate marriage of his grandfather to an heiress, jumped the right way on the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. and backed the successful claimant to the throne, who became James I. Soon after James’ coronation he gave Warwick Castle and its lands to Greville. The Grevilles have had them ever since. The present head of the family, the Earl of Warwick, sold some farmland in Warwickshire for £500,000 in 1959, and moved away to live in Rome. Warwick Castle he handed over to his son, Lord Brooke. The castle makes a nice profit from the hundreds of thousands of tourists who pour in each year, including 500,000 adults at £1 a head. But since 1968 Lord Brooke has been selling off the treasures in the castle, including twenty-six pictures (Canalettos, Rubens, Van Dykes) for about £2 million, and the famous Warwick Vase, the 1800-year-old Roman marble masterpiece at present in a Wimbledon warehouse awaiting a buyer for about £250,000. Now Lord Brooke has sold Warwick Castle itself to Madame Tussauds. the waxwork people, for £1,500.000.

For years Lord Brooke, who prefers to live on various properties he owns abroad, has refused to explain his activities. Finally, in August, he said he had to sell his pictures and so on in order to repair the castle. Now he has sold his castle, unrepaired, and kept the picture money as well.

Lord Brooke should realise that we in the upper class have to put up a united front against all the others, who naturally can’t see why we have all the property. One good excuse is that we really only look after our wealth, as trustees for the nation: we are safeguarding the country’s heritage. The Greville family motto is "Scarcely do I call these things our own". Now he has blown the gaff, and everyone can see what a hollow excuse it was. I sympathize with all those members of the Greville family who arc very annoyed with Brooke for having given the game away so openly, such as his cousin, Priscilla Greville, who said, "the house of Greville is in the dust" (Observer, 8.10.78). She said she hoped that if Tussauds do put some wax models in the castle, as they intend, one of them will be of Lord Brooke being beheaded by the guillotine.

Wednesday

My friend Viscountess Chelsea has had her BMW stolen from a garage in Hungerford. The irritating thing was that she had £150,000 worth of jewellery in the boot. She has offered a £10,000 reward (Daily Mail, 1.11.78). Even worse was what happened to Sheikh Salman Jassim, of the Royal Family of Qatar in the Persian Gulf — I met him some time ago over an oil machinery contract. He was having treatment at a London hospital, and someone stole his bedside briefcase containing gold and diamond jewellery worth £250,000. The country’s coming to a fine pass if one can’t carry a few gem stones round with one.

Thursday

A few years ago I was involved in a small business arrangement with William Stern, a big property dealer. He wasn’t able to control the huge empire he created well enough, and it collapsed leaving him a bankrupt, owing over £100 million. However, he had shown some foresight, and though he has had to draw in his horns a little, he still lives very adequately. He used to spend £70,000 a year, and now he still gets through £30.000 a year. "His six children still go to private schools. His family still live in an elegant house at West Heath Avenue, Golders Green. They still use the luxurious furniture. They can still admire paintings that cost £30,000" (Daily Telegraph, 21.10.78). All the finance comes, apparently, from a trust in New York for his children that he set up in good time before the crash.

A man who can contribute to society by buying and selling property like Mr. Stern deserves to have a luxurious standard of living, even after his slight business contretemps.


Friday

I sent off today for a statue of a horse, ‘'the Flying Horse of Kansu", which should fill a corner in the hall of the new house. It is a reproduction in hall-marked eighteen-carat gold of a Chinese bronze sculpture, found in a Han dynasty tomb. The reproduction weighs 250 grams, and costs £3000. The advert of the company selling these reproductions (this one in gold, and others in silver and brass) gave a lengthy, would-be learned commentary (Daily Telegraph, 21.10.78) covering the historical and cultural background. "The horse is shown in an attitude expressive of ecstasy and freedom supported by one hoof on the back of a flying swallow which turns its head in surprise." Well, it would, wouldn’t it? A pity they can’t spell Buddhist (they think it’s “Budist”), but most of the people who will be coming to my house and listening to me bragging about the cost of the statue aren't too hot on spelling anyway: they don't mind, so long as they have enough arithmetic to count their dividends.


Saturday

When the newly-elected Pope John Paul I died, so soon after the deaths of the previous pope and of Metropolitan Nikodim (officially ranked second in the Russian Orthodox Church), Dr. Billy Graham thought it was significant. He "said in Stockholm yesterday: ’Perhaps in the deaths of Pope Paul VI., Metropolitan Nikodim and Pope John Paul I within such a short time in Rome God may have a message for the world.’ Graham said he did not know what the message was" (Daily Telegraph, 30.10.78).

This Graham man is losing his grip. What we capitalists require, to keep the workers’ minds off stern practicalities, is supernatural certainties, not these vague hints. For example, the Daily Mirror said Yuri Geller would mend watches and clocks by long-range, wholesale magic, if people put them near his photo in the Daily Mirror (in other words, you had to buy the paper to try it). The usual flood of simpletons wrote in convinced that this optimistic treatment had worked, and the Daily Mirror was able to announce in a banner headline taking up most of its front page, “You did it. Yuri!" The same with the miracle shoe which has turned up at a convent in Canada. The old priest who founded the convent died there eighteen months ago. and the nuns who laid him out were convinced they could see a face on the sole of his old shoe — the face of Christ, naturally. The Sunday People (24.9.78) published a picture of it, and if you look a long time at the picture with the eye of faith you might be able to see in the scratch marks something like a face. A professor of organic chemistry at Quebec’s Laval University had no doubts: “there is no possibility that the face was placed there by a human being, using artificial means. That leaves only one conclusion." The convent’s medical adviser (a man doubtless quite impartial as to the prosperity of the convent, to which thousands of pilgrims have been flocking since the discovery) said, “I have no doubt that something strange has happened. This could not have been done artificially."

That's the stuff we capitalists need! One of the best ways to divert the workers’ minds from the annual wage-cut called inflation. for example, is to persuade them there is a great supernatural being demonstrating his power, and reminding them that eternal bliss is in store for them.

Graham should be ashamed of himself.

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist: Sunday (1989)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

We keep getting these sob-stories from organisations concerned with homelessness about how many people are forced to live in late-twentieth-century Britain without a roof over their heads. Shelter, for example, estimates that there are 150,000 young people (apart from the middle-aged and old) homeless in the country (Guardian, 26.10.89). Apparently the number living in squats (illicit accommodation, with eviction a daily possibility and virtually inevitable in the long run) had “almost trebled" since two years ago. One 20-year-old said "no employer would take anyone with no fixed address. To get a fixed address you need money, and to get money you'd need a job. So there's no way out." Except, of course, prostitution. To escape grinding poverty, not a few — both males and females — finally succumb. They don't have to go looking for chances, either. "One in three young people questioned by the researchers had been approached for prostitution."

In this most degrading of sales, as in all others, there are no sellers without buyers. Prostitution depends on the economic system of buying and selling. Without some people rich enough to buy sexual excitement. and others poor enough to have to sell it. prostitution would disappear tomorrow. (Why, I wonder, isn't Mrs Whitehouse a Socialist?) These buyers aren't going to shed tears at the steady recruitment to the prostitution industry which capitalism ensures.

It's an ill wind which blows nobody any good.

Monday

One of the Rothschild family in the last century is supposed to have become interested in landscape gardening after buying a country house. He went so far as to give a lecture on the subject, beginning with the immortal words: "No garden, however small, should have less than three acres of woodland.”

After such expert advice, no one now has any excuse for having too few trees in the garden.

Tuesday

I've always made sure of having enough trees at my country place, particularly fruit trees. I love apples, eaters or cookers. If you get hold of some Bramleys, for example, you have the main ingredient of an apple pie, or tasty fritters, or a succulent apple charlotte. So when I was glancing through the paper (Observer, 29.10.89). I was sad to see it’s been a bad year for apples. 1976, it said, was poor enough, "but this year it seems even worse". A Kent farmer said: "It has been a disaster for Bramleys".

I was just reconciling myself to the idea that there would be fewer apples to go round this year, when my eye fell on the photograph accompanying the text. It showed an enormous pile of apples dumped in a field, and the caption bemoaned "a too fruitful harvest". So that's the problem! Reading the whole story again. I found the disaster was simply that there are "too many" apples. Farmers are being paid £75 per tonne by the European Community "to plough the apples back into the ground": apples are "rotting in vast piles round the Kent countryside": near Maidstone “at least £25.000 worth" of Bramleys were being "crushed into an expensive fertiliser by tractor wheels". Research shows that the average person in Britain eats precisely five Bramleys per year — one every ten weeks. At the same time people eat well-advertised junk food, often almost valueless if not positively harmful — or even go hungry. The many thousands of homeless people living rough in Britain aren't exactly over-fed. And that ignores the multitudes round the world who starve to death each year.

Wednesday

How do they see it, these apple farmers trembling lest their efforts to produce quantities of food should be crowned with success? Do they come back to the farmhouse in the evening saying "all the trees are healthy — no sign of disease. I'm afraid"? Or “masses of blossom has set, not a single gale or pest to give us a decent chance"? Or "the branches are bending to the ground with perfect fruit this year — were ruined”?

We capitalists know, of course, however much we try to conceal it from everyone else, that farmers are not aiming to produce apples, but profit. The number of apples is immaterial: if the profits are high, it's a good year; if the profits are low, it's bad.

And so the journalists who depend on us for jobs have to write whole articles about what a "disaster" it is to have a good crop of Bramleys.

Thursday

Why do people keep saying mass unemployment is a bad thing? From the capitalists' point of view, it's a good thing to keep some workers unemployed "pour encourager les autres"; just as the wartime authorities shoot unenthusiastic soldiers to encourage the others (as Voltaire pointed out). Here's a piece from the Daily Mail (26.10.89)

  Profits in industry soared over the past year to their highest level for a decade, according to a survey. Productivity has leapt 43 per cent compared with six years ago and output per worker is still rising, says a review of the top 1000 companies in Business magazine. Each employee now turns out £57,400 worth of goods or services each year — £1000 more than last year. Average profitability — the amount of industry's total sales which is profit — climbed to a record 9.9 per cent compared to 9.1 per cent last year.

Mind you, the papers shouldn't make too much of a song and dance about it. Not all the readers of the Daily Mail can be stupid: some of them must begin to wonder why. if “each employee" produces £57000 worth of goods, he or she gets paid so mch less than that.

Friday

The release of the Guildford Four (convicted of the Guildford pub bombing on no evidence whatever except for "confessions” which conflicted with and contradicted each other, which contained impossibilities. and which, it is now accepted, the police had beaten and blackmailed out of them) has been hailed as a triumph of justice. Quite right, of course. In fact, if you've ever been convicted of a crime you didn't commit, in circumstances where there is no single piece of objective evidence at all connecting you with the crime, then all you need (if the Guildford Four case is anything to go by) is your innocence proclaimed by —

• Many writers and public figures who support capitalism, but cannot stomach its worst injustices;
• Two former eminent judges (in the Guildford case, Lord Devlin and Lord Scarman);
• The two leading churchmen in the country (Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Runcie);
• Two former Home Secretaries (Roy Jenkins and Merlyn Rees);
• A campaigning TV programme at peak viewing time (produced by Yorkshire TV);
• Two full-length books (one by Robert Kee, one by Grant McKee and Ros Franey);
• Radio and TV programmes, newspapers and periodicals in Ireland;
• Numbers of articles in England (for example in the New Statesman):
• The people who actually did what you were accused of (in this case, the IRA men whose confessions gave such detail as to prove they were genuine);
• And, finally, the Crown Prosecution Service (who refused to justify the convictions in the Court of Appeal).

If you’ve got all that going for you. then after only fifteen years in jail, being beaten up occasionally by other prisoners who loyally support the Establishment — you're free!

It makes me proud of our capitalist propaganda services to think they can still argue that this is a triumph for British justice.

Saturday

Members of Christian CND want to hold their own Remembrance Service on Armistice Day. They want "to draw attention to the appalling loss of life and human suffering" in war (Eastern Evening News, 31.10.89). ‘‘We want methods and ways to be found to prevent wars happening again."

Obviously these simple people, who are still looking for ‘‘methods and ways" of preventing war, haven’t heard of Socialism. So all is well. These peace-time pacifists will be no more effective than they were on the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when you had to jump out of the way to avoid being trampled to death by the rush of Christians, pacifists, Peace Pledge Unionists and so on into the recruiting offices.

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist (1979)

From the January 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

SUNDAY
Been making arrangements for my next little trip abroad, a three-month world cruise in the P&O flagship Canberra, starting on January 6. I’ve got one of the cheapest two-berth cabins for my wife and myself, for about £6000 (Observer, 19.11.78). I’ve got a good management team, and they’ll keep my businesses running nicely until I get back.


MONDAY
I keep reading of alleged incidents where companies have to pay compensation for “wrongful dismissal” to people they have sacked, or where they have to make “severance payments” when they close down a factory. All that the relevant Acts of Parliament do in effect is to help weed out the less crafty capitalists, which of course helps capitalism generally to run better for the capitalist class as a whole.

Why can’t these people remember that any worker on strike can be sacked forthwith, without any comeback? And any employer worth his salt can bring about a strike whenever he wants one. I’ve often engineered a strike when stocks have been high, and I have wanted to close a factory down for a spell without any labour costs, particularly where the shop stewards have been getting above themselves. Nothing is easier. If the weather is cold (as it is two-thirds of the year in this country) the manager goes into the works one evening or weekend, and unfortunately the central heating breaks down, and the defective part can’t be obtained under two months. Or the local team is having a cup replay one evening, and the manager tells everyone they’re on compulsory overtime until the match is over. Or you get a quality inspector to reject a whole batch of work from one assembly line, so bang goes their bonus.

Or the lavatories and wash-basins keep getting blocked up, or the tea-break concession is suddenly withdrawn, or the man who's just been elected an official of his union branch is by a pure coincidence moved to a worse job the very next day. The number of possible dodges is endless—it’s like taking candy off a child. Then, when your stocks have run down a bit, and the workers have been slated solidly as idle, good-for-nothing layabouts by the press, radio, and TV (everyone from ministers, MPs and editors down to flat-capped comedians getting into the act), you generously let them crawl back to work on your terms.

So to avoid any "wrongful dismissal” nonsense you just provoke a strike over any issue you want, and then sack the lot. You can't sack only some of them, because the Labourites put through an act saying that would be victimisation : so you sack every last striker— as George Ward did at Grunwick, or the Margolis family did in the Garners Steak House dispute, both struggles over whether the workers could be represented by a union or not. (They had to find out the hard way.)

What I love doing as I issue dismissal notices is to say how much I would have liked to take the strikers back, apart from one or two ringleaders, of course, but unhappily the Act of Parliament passed by the very Labour Party their union supports makes it quite impossible. Then I make some crack about most of them being good chaps at heart, but sadly misled by their shop stewards, who have inveigled them all into a strike which has only had this sad result — the sack. That’s a shrewd blow at all the union enthusiasts.

The pleasures of being a capitalist are not limited to merely grabbing all the profits!


TUESDAY
Talking of provocation, I was in two minds about the pronouncements recently made in Washington by John Toland. the historian (Daily Telegraph, 1.12.78). He said that President Roosevelt enticed the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbour in 1941, thus beginning the American-Japanese War. Now we members of the ruling class all know that a country goes to war to defend its interests as a capitalist state, and that the carefully prepared story that it has no option, in face of the foul and unprovoked aggression committed by the bestial enemy (a story put out by both sides, and equally firmly believed by the populations of both countries) is so much bunkum. I know Toland went on to say that Roosevelt had done it for the best of reasons, getting America into the war in a way that circumvented the objections many Americans would have had, but, even supposing Toland’s theory is correct, should one ever be so frank? My friends tell me that it doesn’t matter now—it was nearly forty years ago, and the workers are too stupid (after undergoing their brainwashing in our educational system) to draw any parallels the next time it happens. But I don’t know, I don’t know. Some workers may be brighter than we think.


WEDNESDAY
Another old friend of mine in trouble! He is a wealthy entrepreneur in his fifties, owning a number of London restaurants, and “living in style” (Daily Telegraph, 1.12.78). Part of the style was a model and actress in her twenties, who agreed to become his mistress. He bought her a £25,000 house, paid her bills, and made her regular payments of £75 a week (at 1973 prices). Then she became pregnant. To my friend’s dismay, she made the ungrateful decision that she wanted to have the baby, instead of disposing of it by an abortion. Here was a rich man paying her for performing a certain role (which is one of the fundamental relationships of our society), and she was allowing her maternal desires to spoil the whole thing. She was putting humanity before her rich friend’s interests. That kind of thing is immoral, in my opinion. Naturally he stopped his weekly payments, and tried to get her out of her home. She went to the High Court, and asked them to say the house was hers. My friend told the judge he was “very upset” about the pregnancy; "there was no reason for her to go on and have the child” (Daily Telegraph, 2.12.78). However, his ex-mistress has been given the right to stay in the house—until she marries or finds another man who will support her.

As I always say to my friends: enjoy your pleasures, certainly—it’s your right as a capitalist in a capitalist society, where everything is available, thank God, to those who can afford it —but make sure you can clear off without trouble when the time comes. In the same circumstances, for example, I always fix up a rented flat, rather than buying a house.

THURSDAY

I’m still getting together a few sticks of furniture. At the sale-room today there was rather a splendid table—the so-called Combe Abbey Library 'I'able, made in 1754, and attributed to Thomas Chippendale. I bought it for £100,000 (Daily Telegraph, 2.12.78). If you want the best, you have to pay for it

Saw Harry Hyams, the property man (Centre Point and all that), at the sale. He bought a 1740 giltwood chandelier for his place down in Wiltshire. He only gave £59,500 for it. I condoled with him on having to go for the cheaper stuff, and offered to lend him his trainfare back home. Jokingly, of course.

FRIDAY

At the Dorchester this evening for the unveiling of a new portrait of the Queen commissioned by the officers of the 16th/5th Queens Royal Lancers (Daily Telegraph, 30.11.78). The painter was telling all and sundry that when he turned up for the first sitting, he said the regiment had asked him to paint the Queen in a green dress. “I was taken to see her wardrobe, and there were at least 110 green dresses.”

 

Now we all know that the Queen has a large wardrobe—if she has 110 dresses in only one colour, how many has she altogether?—but this affair was badly managed. The painter chap should have been shown say a dozen or so green dresses—a normal kind of number for a well-dressed woman about town, when you allow for other colours and other kinds of outfits. Then he wouldn’t have been making such a sensation of it in the Dorchester. Even there some inky scribe might hear of it and put it in the papers. Then workers might be tempted to calculate that the whole lifetime’s earnings of a skilled man—if he never bought any food, or clothing, or housing, or anything else, for himself or his family— would hardly be enough to buy what is currently in the Queen’s wardrobe.

It’s not what we do that we have to worry about: it’s what people get to know that we do.

SATURDAY

Got an unostentatious little gold necklace with carved lapis stones for the wife’s birthday, £575 (Daily Telegraph, 22.11.78). Then bought myself a dozen bottles of Chateau Lafite 1945 (Daily Telegraph, 1.2.78). for £1900, or about £158 a bottle. It really is splendid stuff. How can so many people drink this cheap rubbish one sees about, at £10 a bottle or even less?

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist (1978)

From the April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

   We print below some excerpts from a journal, giving the private thoughts of a member of the ruling class (not always the same as their opinions for public consumption, which is what you can read every day throughout the British press). We hope to print further extracts from time to time. 

Sunday. My new Rolls-Royce drophead is going splendidly. It’s very good value for £45,000. As the Rolls- Royce adverts used to say a few years back, if you have a Rolls everyone can see you’ve got good taste. So I’ve proved I’ve got that, all right—£45,000 worth of it.

I keep the Rolls mainly for business journeys, for example going up to town to my head office. As chairman of the company, I have to travel in a certain style. The car is kept smart by a firm I’ve found in the City, run by an ex-chauffeur (Sunday Telegraph, 15.1.78). They take your Rolls in for a day and give it a good service and clean, right down to hand-polishing the radiator and putting saddle soap on the leather upholstery, for £100; then, after that, they come and pick the car up one day a week and keep it up to standard, for only £45. They think one good going-over per week is enough to maintain a Rolls as a credit to its owner, and it’s dirt cheap at only nine fivers a week.

My butler and I parted company today—I found him reading a rag which said we should abolish the wages system! As I said, how am I going to get people to produce the goods which make my profits without a wages system? I’ve put an ad in the paper for another one, offering £7,000 a year and car allowance, which is what a decent butler gets nowadays (domestic situations, The Times, 20.1.78).


Monday. Dropped in at an interesting press conference this morning, held by the Independent Schools Information Service. Its director claimed that many manual workers—he instanced miners, a machine operator, a fairground worker, a policeman, and a postman—send their children to independent schools. “We reject the epithet ‘bastions of privilege’,” he said (The Times, 17.1.78). There are, of course, independent schools and independent schools. They range from the very expensive, with highly paid staff and lavish equipment, and a pupil-teacher ratio as low as six to one, to the ramshackle institutions which offer worse premises and lower-paid teachers than most state schools, and which only survive because of snobbery among some parents. The really posh public schools charge about £2,000 a year, so my two sons set me back some £4,000 annually. I don’t think we need worry, at those prices, that our boys at Eton are going to be swamped by proletarian brats; and if there was a risk they’d put the price up.


Tuesday. Another bit of news in the paper: it appears that the workers regularly go hunting, besides sending their children to public schools. The Master of the Cotswold Hunt denied the other day that fox-hunting is an upper-class sport. “That’s an outdated belief. We have many working people who come to the hunt on Saturday afternoons” (TV Times, 26.1.78).

The MFH’s forthright words made me sit down and work out how much it costs me to go fox-hunting. I bought my hunter—not a bad piece of horseflesh—for £2,000. Then there’s the saddle, £100, and bridle, £50. The clothes cost me about £400—a couple of hunting jackets (£100 each), breeches £50, whip £10, handmade boots £100, top hat £20. On top of that the horse costs £30 a week at livery stables, plus about £100 a year for shoeing, and then there are vets’ fees, rugs and blankets, and so on. Besides all that the stable charges for transport, though one could always buy a trailer for £500. Then the fox-hunter mustn’t forget his, or her, “evening dress wear for the important social side of the hunt” (as the TV Times puts it); and this isn’t the ordinary evening dress outfit I put on for dinner every night, but a special rig-out I keep specially for hunt functions. The Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, for example, has distinctive evening dress with scarlet facings, and the East Kent prescribes “evening dress—scarlet, buff silk collar, white silk facings”.

I suppose most people suspect that hunting in the proper style, like sending your children to good boarding schools, is only for the rich; but this propaganda to the contrary helps to keep the poorer people happy, which is good for capitalism.


Wednesday. Had a bit of trouble today at one of the factories owned by the family holding company. The workers are asking 15 per cent more pay. They say prices have gone up 10 per cent in the last year, and an increase of 15 per cent, after tax and other deductions, means (for all except the very poor) only 10 per cent more take-home pay. So they needed 15 per cent merely to regain the same position they were in a year ago (ignoring all the losses they have suffered as prices have gone up each month, though their wages remained stationary). They had the nerve to point out that our profits went up 35 per cent on last year’s (just like the Barclay’s Bank profits, Daily Telegraph, 24.2.78), so we could easily afford 15 per cent more pay.

I went down there, and called the union representatives in to a meeting. I said I had every sympathy with their claim, and in normal times (of course, “normal times” never come, but they were too polite to mention it) I would naturally agree to restore their nominal pay so that in real terms they wouldn’t have to take a cut in the wages they agreed this time last year. But, I said, it just couldn’t be done. The national interest, I said, demanded sacrifices from us all (especially them, though I didn’t say so aloud!), and I was naturally obliged to support the Government, which had laid down only 10 per cent wage increases. I gave them all the usual stuff —law and order must be upheld, respect for our democratic institutions, light at the end of the tunnel, putting this old country of ours back on its feet, the regular load of clap-trap—and in the end they had to accept the 10 per cent. I’d worked hard for it, though. I had a meeting with one of the head-office boys in their union yesterday—plush London hotel, slap-up meal, brandies ad lib, cigars on the house—and finally he agreed we would all have to tighten our belts. At least his members would. So he came down to the factory today and backed me to the hilt. You put the Labour Government in, he kept telling the shop stewards: you aren’t going to turn traitors now, are you?—the usual trade-union leaders’ line. So we got our agreement signed and sealed, and the factory hands got back to their proper job of building up my profits, for lower real wages than they agreed last year.

Thursday. More trouble today. One of the small companies owned by the family trust has a chain of provincial hairdressing shops. At one of these shops the staff were turning nasty. An assistant had found out that employers are supposed by law to pay the wage-rates set by the wages council for the industry, and began complaining that their pay was below even the wages council’s low figure, which starts at £26.50 for a forty-hour week. He’d read somewhere about the Low Pay Unit’s report that twenty-four in a hundred hairdressing employers pay below the minimum legal figure (The Times, 3.2.78). So I went down to sort it out. The trouble-maker began spouting at me about upholding law and order, and our democratic institutions and so on, so I shut him up a bit sharpish. I told them I’d close the place down completely if there was any more trouble (they don’t belong to a union, so we can be a bit more direct in our methods). There’s nothing like a million and a half people in the dole queue to make the others see reason! So back to work they went.

I’ll have to watch that agitator, though. He had some cheek, quoting law and order at me. He’ll have to realize that law and order is intended to help people like me keep him in his place: not the other way round. 

Friday. Marvellous meal this evening at the Inn on the Park’s Four Seasons restaurant. Normally a meal for two there costs about £26 (The Times, 7.2.78), but this week four chefs from Maxim’s in Paris have come over to superintend the cuisine, so dinner for my girl friend and me this evening cost £60. The girl friend said if the hairdressing assistants who were so awkward yesterday saved their entire week’s wages, they could almost afford one meal at these prices! We had a good laugh about it over the Filets de Sole Albert.

Saturday. Bought the wife a new coat—ocelot fur, with lynx border, £3,000 (Sunday Times, 4.12.77). And booked a three-week cruise in May for the two of us to the West Indies, £1,392 (Daily Telegraph, 24.2.78). It’ll make a nice break.

I turned down a four-week art treasures tour to Bali, Java, and so on, which would have been £2,496 for the two of us (Sunday Times, 4.12.77). One doesn’t want to be ostentatious in these hard times.

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of the Capitalist: Sunday (1990)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the January 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday
One thing that keeps me happy as a capitalist is the sheer brainlessness of so much of the propaganda put out by people claiming to be "socialists". After Nigel Lawson resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer. I saw numbers of posters, each line in larger capitals than the last: SOCIALIST WORKER. TORIES IN CRISIS. LAWSON'S GONE. NOW GET THATCHER.

“Lawson's Gone". Why? Because after six years proclaiming that he was going to "make the pound strong", keep down interest rates, and end inflation, the economy had produced a pound falling against all major currencies, high and increasing interest rates, and high and increasing inflation. There was a growing feeling in the Tory party that he should go. and let a "new" man try to convince the simpler-minded voters that he was going "to make the pound strong", keep down interest rates, end inflation, etc. etc.

Secondly. Lawson was getting to the age when he felt he should turn his years of high office, his national notoriety, TV exposure. and so on, into more tangible resources: in other words, to retire, and go into the City. There dozens of companies would fall over themselves to give him many thousands a year each just to put his name ("Right Honourable Nigel Lawson. former Chancellor of the Exchequer") on their letter-heads—in return for nothing more energetic than attending directors' meetings once or twice a year. Adulation and applause keep politicians in public life for a long time, but there comes a point when their minds turn to more bankable assets.

Though comfortably off. Lawson had unfortunately lost some money—as the papers pointed out unkindly on his resignation—when the stock market took one of its periodic dives a few years ago. Incidentally, you'd think a man claiming to control the national economy could control his own economy rather better, wouldn't you? Strange that a man pretending to foresee the highly complex future of the whole country’s industrial and financial activities. couldn't foresee tomorrow's movement of prices on the Stock Exchange.

Because of these two factors. Lawson seized the opportunity of Mrs Thatcher's employment of an advisor (Alan Waters) who disagreed with him on some points of economic policy, to resign, and devote himself to becoming seriously rich.

And some Trotskyites issue posters which must mean, if they mean anything, that in some mysterious way far-left militants had helped to get rid of Lawson, and therefore had a chance of ousting Thatcher.


Monday
Amazing how long-lived is the belief that different faces running capitalism are going to make some significant change. I remember that in the early 1950s. enjoying a post-luncheon stroll in the West End. I saw a procession with banners demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister, Churchill: it was going in the direction of Hyde Park for a rally. I walked along on the pavement, and one of the marchers said all they needed was somebody to shoot Churchill. I had to point out that Churchill was already far gone in senility, that the then premier for all practical purposes was R. A. Butler, and that when Churchill died (an event expected almost daily) then Butler, or Eden, or some other luminary, would take over, and what difference would it make? Not to mention that the police would run round and vigorously interrogate a large number of reformists like himself in order to get a confession out of somebody. And all for doing what in a week or two Churchill's lifetime devotion to brandy and cigars was going to do anyway.

But it was no good. Only shoot Churchill, he reiterated, and capitalism would come crashing down. Shortly afterwards Churchill died. Eden became premier, and capitalism, strange as it may seem, survived.


Tuesday
The fact that we capitalists own or control, directly or indirectly, virtually the whole of the media, is of crucial importance to the preservation of capitalist society. It isn't so much a matter of enforcing our own opinions (though that's part of it); it is a question of establishing what people ought to have opinions about. It isn't merely a matter of making sure that we win all the arguments: it is a question of laying down what people should be arguing over. No national newspaper or TV channel would dream of denouncing socialism, and attacking a moneyless, wageless society without exploitation, where people would jointly own the factories, land, means of transport and so on, and where society was really democratic, because if socialism was once brought on to the agenda, as it were, then some people might well start to think that it sounded a good idea.

Those who “set the agenda" can go a long way towards preventing undesirable subjects ever being heard about; that's why individual capitalists, or the state on behalf of all the capitalists, own the media (apart from the fact that only rich people could own such things anyway). 

Wednesday

Of course there are plenty of political arguments in the papers and on TV. These arguments are between sections of the capitalist class. Just as capitalists in one state often (or always) contend against those in other states, at worst going to war with them, so capitalists in the same state argue with each other. For example, the whole business of nationalisation versus privatisation. Some capitalists think that all industries, raw materials, etc, should be owned by individual capitalists, so that they can make a profit out of them. Other capitalists think that some materials or networks are so essential to the capitalist class generally—water, for example, or railways, or the various forms of power— that any group of capitalists gaining control of them could hold the rest of the capitalist class to ransom. Supposing the owners of all the water companies got together and said to the rest of the owning class "no more water, unless prices rise by 100 per cent or 1000 per cent”. No one can live, never mind run a profitable business, without water; so the water owners would be able to extort massive gains out of the rest of the ruling class.

Same with railways. Suppose the railway and road-transport owners ganged up on all the other capitalists, couldn't they in effect blackmail them? Ditto power—coal, gas. electricity. Is their ownership so important that the individual capitalist could best protect his own interests by making sure that all capitalists jointly—the state—should own these things? And supposing foreigners controlled “our" essential supplies? French companies already have a foothold in the ownership of British water. Suppose war broke out, and the French were on the other side? Or suppose the railways were owned by the Japanese, and there was another Anglo-Japanese war; could the Japanese owners sabotage the entire British war effort? It was considerations like these that led Bismark, for example, to insist on the state-ownership of the German railways (so troops could be rushed from one side of the country to the other in time of war). No one accused him of turning socialist; he was simply protecting (as he saw it) the interests of the whole German capitalist class.

For various reasons, some sections of the British working class have supported, at some times, state-ownership of power, or of transport, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do with socialism. 

Thursday

Another argument within the capitalist class is this: do you get more profits out of in  “your" workers by treating them kindly, or by treating them badly? Does productivity go up if you remove the fear of mass unemployment, give workers good treatment when they're ill, and promise them a decent pension when they’re old? Or does productivity increase if the workers have the fear of the sack always hanging over them; if they have to work harder to pay for private medical care, and to finance their own future pensions?

We in the capitalist class argue about these things constantly; sometimes there's a majority for the kinder treatment, sometimes for the tougher. It's our argument, and that's why it's carried on in the columns of our press, and in the programmes of our radio and TV. Workers try to join in the argument. Usually (surprise, surprise) they favour the kinder treatment, though sometimes their miserable environment makes them hate even their fellow-workers, and they support the “I hire 'em. I fire 'em” school.

Workers taking part in this argument convince themselves they're really in touch with the basic issues of the day. Of course their trade unions will try to get the best conditions possible; but apart from trade-union activity, workers supporting one or other of the two main schools of capitalist thought are falling for our propaganda. Instead of arguing against capitalism, they're arguing about what kind of treatment they can hope for while remaining the oppressed class within capitalism.

You might get a similar argument among farmers. One farmer could be sure he gets a higher profit from his animals by mending the holes in the shed-roof, giving them plenty of straw, feeding them the best of cattle-cake. Another is convinced he gets higher profits by saving on repairs, buying less straw and worse food. If the animals were asked, most of them no doubt would support the kinder treatment. But either way they would be supporting their own exploitation.

Friday

The water-privatisation shares have been issued on such terms that a certain profit of over 20 per cent is assured to buyers. So many people with a few hundreds of spare money rush to buy the shares. The government then claims a triumph for "popular capitalism".

The government is Conservative. The majority of the buyers—with the spare cash, and the knowledge of share-buying necessary—would be Conservative. In past centuries they used to call it bribery.

However, people of more than one political persuasion have picked up the money offered, without in any way changing their opinions. The idea that anyone accepting the government hand-out is thereby supporting a particular version of capitalism is ludicrous. I suppose if you started a club, and promised anyone joining £100, you would have a lot of new members; especially if they could (and most would) leave immediately they'd got their £100. But to say that the grateful recipients of the £100 were showing their dedication to the club's aims would be ridiculous.

 

Saturday

Maxwell's Daily Mirror; or the Daily Maxwell, can't leave Manchester United alone. Maxwell's reporter seizes on (not surprising) criticism of chairman Martin Edwards for his £95,000 a year “salary" at the club's annual meeting. The back-page banner headline is "This Club is Obscene" (6 December).

The main obscenity about Manchester United in Maxwell's view is that Maxwell failed in his bid to buy it. Edwards turned him down, and Maxwell is getting his revenge. But he should really control himself better. The interests of us all in the owning class are not best served by headlining how much one particular capitalist gets for doing so little.

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist (1989)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

So Manchester United football club is being sold. Or not, as the case may be. Martin Edwards, who owns 500,000 shares, just over half the total, has the controlling interest. How do you get control of a great football club? Perhaps Edwards got up early as a youngster, cleaned the players' boots, laundered the strip, swept the terraces, and saved up all his money to buy the shares one at a time? Well no, actually. His father (a rich businessman) owned the shares, and left them to young Martin when he died.

Now Martin wants to sell, no doubt to put the money into something even more profitable. Though he has done very well out of Manchester United, thanks very much. He draws a “salary" of £85,000 a year (Guardian, 19 August), plus the interest on his shares, for duties which appear to consist mainly of sitting each week on one of the best seats in the ground and watching the most exciting football team in the country. But obviously Edwards thinks his money will do better elsewhere. So he looks round for a bidder. And up pops another businessman, Michael Knighton, who promises him £10 million for his shares. He also has to promise to buy the other 49 per cent plus of the shares on the same terms (as the present take-over law insists), and promises another £10 million to make improvements at Old Trafford. That makes £30 million in all. He then tells the assembled journalists that "£30 million is not a lot in commercial terms" (Guardian, 19 August). That is quite right of course. To any solid capitalist, like myself for instance, £30 million isn't a lot. But I wish to God he wouldn't announce it publicly. Whatever will all the groups of workers presently being offered an annual wage-adjustment of less than the inflation rate (i.e., a drop in pay)—ambulance staff, for example, and classroom teachers— think about that? A worker high enough in the rat-race to receive £10,000 a year (never mind the millions on less) would have to slog his guts out for precisely 3000 years to get his £30 million—assuming, that is, he could get his food, clothes, housing and so on free during all that time. And Knighton tells the world “that £30 million is not a lot in commercial terms".

Knighton will have to cure himself of the urge to tell the truth if he has capitalism's long-term interests at heart.

Monday

Now, it seems, Knighton is having trouble completing the deal. At first he claimed he was alone in the purchase: “I am Mr Big, I'm not fronting a consortium" (Daily Mirror, 4 October). Then he had to admit he did have backers. Then it transpires that Knighton's original backers have dropped out, and he is looking for other backers, or buyers. Knighton told the press "he was still seeking partners, as as I said at the start'. In fact that is precisely what he did not say" (Guardian, 5 October). In effect Knighton is hawking round his option to buy Edwards' shares, and David Murray— a millionaire who bought control of Glasgow Rangers—thought he might make a profit of £5 or 6 million on the deal (Guardian, 5 October).

Journalists reproaching Knighton for telling a few small porkies should remember that people don’t make fortunes by adhering strictly to the truth. The real criticism of Knighton is that he is a small boy (in capitalist terms) trying to push in among the big boys—playing out of his league, so to speak. As the Mirror (7 October) said, he tried to buy United "without having the full funds to go ahead with it”; he is “no more than a cheapskate”.

In other words, if he was a dearskate. and could afford it, it would have been all right.

Tuesday

The papers are bemoaning what's happening to Manchester United. This magnificent football club, they wail, centre of dreams and devotion for many thousands, is being auctioned off like a joblot of odds and ends down at the local market.

For example, Pat Crerand, former Manchester United midfield star, in the Daily Mirror (6 October): “I could honestly weep for what is happening to my beloved United...the heart is being torn from the club...distress and suffering...we just can't go on like this”. And why the anguish? Why, "Knighton is just trying to make money". He is merely "coming in to make a fast buck".

Where have these people been all their lives? Living on Mars? In a capitalist society everything that can be given a price is for sale. Food, clothing, houses, and most other things too—you can have them if you can afford them. Honour, virtue, discretion, confidentiality—all will crumble before a big enough offer.

In fact, it’s got to the point where former United footballing stars can make money out of the "distress and suffering” of the club by producing articles in the tabloids.

Wednesday

It reminds me of a well-known story. Two guests at a high-society dinner table start talking. The man says to the woman, "Would you sleep with me if I gave you £5 million?"

The woman was taken aback, but thought it over.

"Well, yes, all right”, she said finally. "For £5 million I’d be mad not to."

"Would you sleep with me if I gave you £5?" asked the man.

“What do you think I am?" demanded the woman indignantly.

"We've already decided that", said the man. “Now we're trying to fix the price.”

Capitalism is a system where almost everything is for sale. It only remains to fix the price.

Thursday

Journalists have spent most of the last week outdoing each other with vivid turns of phrase to describe the sale of Manchester United football club. One came up with: "Britain's best-loved football club . . . being bought and sold like a box of kippers” (Daily Mirror, 6 October).

Socialists, of course, know as well as I do that kippers are produced and distributed solely by workers (whether managers or shopfloor hands, white-collar, blue-collar, or no-collar). All capitalists do is to seize a profit at each stage, like a gang of blackmailers holding the useful part of society to ransom. They know that it’s only lack of class-consciousness on the part of the working class that allows capitalists to “own” industries, and impose the wage and price system on the rest of society.

So Socialists will want to ask why a box of kippers should be bought and sold like a football club.

Friday

Now the story in the papers is that Knighton has not been able to come up with enough financial backing to buy the club, and Edwards and the present board of directors are so embarrassed by the hostile publicity that they are prepared to buy back Knighton’s contract for £11 million. This, if it happened, would give Knighton a profit of £1 million on the deal, which would mean that he had made "£20,000 every day since his bid was made public on August 18" (Guardian, 7 October). Knighton says “I have spent every waking hour over the last three months working on the deal” (Observer, 8 October), implying he is entitled to his profit. But ambulance crews, who have spent nearly all their waking hours for the last three months and longer taking sick people to hospital, would be glad to get only part of the suggested daily profit—as their whole annual salary.

Workers can work all that out just as well as I can. So Knighton would be doing capitalism a great service if he quietly faded from the scene, before attracting more unpopularity for one of capitalism's basic features—buying and selling.

Saturday

I wish Martin Edwards and the other rich men on the United board of directors could decide what proportion of the shares he owns. On 5 October, for example, at least three figures appeared: 51 per cent (Guardian, page 16); 50.2 per cent (Guardian, page 1); and 50.04 per cent (Mirror, back page). Only one of them can be right. All these figures presumably came from the wealthy directors or their accountants. Since we capitalists like to bamboozle workers by pretending we’re richer than they are because we're so much cleverer, it’s embarrassing when it turns out that we can’t do simple sums.

Alwyn Edgar