Diary of a Capitalist (1978)

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

Sunday

Christmas will soon be here again. The problem of presents becomes harder the richer one gets; almost all one’s acquaintances have got everything they could reasonably want anyway, so what on earth does one buy them? I was reminded of my Christmas shopping two years ago by finding a brochure showing some of the things one could buy at Christmas 1976. I bought several of the things illustrated—for despite what I just wrote, there are always various young persons around who are very ready to show their gratitude in return for one’s generosity. One young friend of mine told me she’d taken up cycling for her figure, so I bought her the Austro-Daimler Ultima Superleicht. advertised as the world’s most expensive bicycle, for £600; and to go with it, a pair of gold cycle clips, each inset with a diamond, for £1200 the pair. Along with a Baignoire gold wristwatch, £700, they made a nice little parcel on the handlebars of the bike. For another close friend I got an eighteen-carat gold cigarette lighter with a diamond-studded top. which cost £5000 from Cartiers.

This year, of course, after two more years of inflation, little gifts like that could be quite expensive.

Monday

Talking of inflation, some newspaper and TV commentators speak of it as if it were an unaccountable visitation, perhaps supernaturally inflicted on us to punish us for our sins. In fact our inflation, and its exact degree from year to year, is decided by successive Governments when they arrange how large the money issue will be. An increase in the money in circulation means inflation; a greater increase means greater inflation. If the money issue was held steady, there could be no inflation; while if it was diminished, there would be deflation.

Politicians prefer a certain amount of inflation because they believe it prevents the unemployment figures getting higher still, which would be a drawback electorally.

As an individual capitalist, however, I can see that one of the main benefits of inflation to me and those like me is that it inflicts an automatic wage-cut on every employee every year: 10 per cent inflation, 10 per cent wage-cut, 15 per cent inflation, 15 per cent wage-cut, and so on. The workers try to increase the nominal value of their pay to maintain its real value; so they can always be depicted in the media as greedy, grasping, never satisfied. In the 1920s, there was actually deflation. Employers naturally tried to reduce the nominal amount of wages in order to prevent their real value continually rising. In those days it was easier to depict the employers as greedy, heartless Scrooges. It was one such attempt to cut wages in this old-fashioned way, in 1926, by reducing the miners’ pay and then locking them out when they refused to accept the reduction, which led to the General Strike. (It’s very satisfying, incidentally, to see that many of the history books call the miners’ lock-out a strike; showing that historians like to keep the appropriate ruling-class propaganda in their accounts even when it is easily shown to be factually inaccurate.) We defeated the General Strike, of course, but it was very unpleasant while it lasted. Now we have a way to force a wage-cut on every one, not only on selected industries, every year, even every month; and some innocent "experts’’ wonder why inflation has continued without abatement since the 1930s.

Do they think the ruling class are all fools?

Tuesday

One enjoyable way to spend one’s profits is in buying a boat and cruising our coastal waters. One chum of mine, Byron Alexander, a successful businessman with three companies and a luxurious house in Chalfont St Giles, has bought a £40,000 twin-engined cruiser; it has £6000-worth of electronic gadgetry on board, and he keeps it at Hamble on Southampton Water. Every weekend he drives down there in his Rolls, and acts as a voluntary auxiliary coastguard. "I am in the fortunate position of being able to do what I want”, he told a reporter (Daily Mail, 12.4.78). "Some people in my position would build a model railway or just spend their money on enjoying themselves. I prefer doing this. It’s my hobby.’’

The cruiser costs about £11,000 a year to operate.

Wednesday

Met Lady Compton this morning. She told me she "has rejected London life and men to concentrate on three-day eventing (like Princess Anne)” (Evening News, 31.8.78). She was divorced not long ago from Lord Compton, who has since succeeded as Marquis of Northampton. She was his second wife, and she got a “generous six-figure divorce settlement”. However, the marquis has enough left; he is worth £20 million.

This afternoon went to Sotheby’s, and bought a double magnum of 1870 port for £280. A chap I knew at school got a magnum of 1811 cognac for £520 (Daily Telegraph, 30.9.78). I could never touch some of the cheap wines and spirits that ordinary people seem to buy. I suppose they enjoy them; not everyone can have an educated palate like mine.

Thursday

People have been making a fuss over Lord (Lew) Grade’s pay-rise from £59,500 a year to over £200.000, and Tiny Rowland’s from £70,000 to £80,000. Rowland’s increase has been contrasted with the way Lonrho (Rowland’s group of companies) treated a caretaker. Lonrho sold off 24 of a block of 48 flats they owned in Islington for £128.000; and then reduced the caretaker's pay (he also had accommodation. light, and heat from £25.50 to £12.50 (Sunday Mirror, 20.8.78). Grumbles have been heard that the rises self-awarded to Grade and Rowland don't square with the Government’s guide-lines. Why can’t people realise that the Government was intending to control the workers, not the capitalists?

In my own case, my ostensible income, which I report to the tax authorities, is only part of my real gains from my businesses: the rest comes from all kinds of perks within the company, week-ends at country “conference centres” near grouse moors, travelling overseas to foreign trade shows in say Switzerland or Florida (who knows how often you attend?) and so on.

Friday

The widow of Leo Bodmer has disappeared in unusual circumstances. I knew Leo years ago—he was president of a Swiss newspaper, and a director of an engineering group. Since Leo’s death, his widow Iris has been living at the Palace Hotel in Lausanne (Sunday Times, 23.7.78). Then she decided to go on the QE2. on a cruise it was making from New York via the Panama Canal and Tahiti to Tasmania and Australia, then returning via Hong Kong. Yokohama and Honolulu to San Francisco. She flew to New York, and stayed at the Plaza Hotel while she booked her ticket. Prices for the cruise went up to £88,500, plus extras, for a duplex penthouse; Mrs Bodmer paid only £4700 for the first part of the voyage, to Sydney. She enjoyed it. and paid another £5700 to go on to Honolulu. She had with her 18 trunks for her possessions, including fur coats and jewellery. On special occasions ‘‘she would don a million dollars’ worth of jewellery. Sometimes it was the pearl necklaces, sometimes the rubies-and- diamonds."

When the QE2 was nearly at Honolulu, Iris Bodmer disappeared. The maid who came to call her one morning found her cabin empty, and her bed not slept in. Most of her gems she had put in a safe-deposit box on board, but apparently not all of them.

No trace of her has been found since. The Swiss authorities have failed to discover any relative who might inherit the Bodmer fortune. Police enquiries have been no more than tentative; Mrs Bodmer was a Swiss national, in a British ship, approaching American waters. None of the three national authorities involved appears to have made a thorough investigation. The ruling classes of different states must obviously be rivals of each other, whether in peace-time economic competition or open war; but surely they should be able to co-operate in a matter such as this

Saturday

Two peers among my acquaintances have both gone into the restaurant business—Viscount Newport and Baron Burghersh. They have both decided to expand, and open new premises in Beverly Hills, California. Burghersh is going to fly over a hundred friends for the inauguration of his new venture some time next year (Evening News, 31.8.78). I’m expecting my invitation any day now.

I saw an advertising brochure for The Times recently, and it claims there were 155,000 Times readers who took three or more holidays every year. If the people who go round making the necessary interviews ever come to me, should I include jaunts like this one in my “holidays”—flying 6000 miles to join in the junketings when a new business venture opens?

I don’t think I would count it. After all. when you look at it carefully, it’s just a business trip to promote a new venture, isn’t it?

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist (1978)

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

Sunday

I came to stay at Claridge’s recently, during the strike by some of its staff, to demonstrate my solidarity with the hotel’s owners. The rooms cost from £38.50 a night upwards (Times, 11.4.78 and 15.4.78), so it was not a cheap gesture. In contrast, a London waiter’s pay had just been increased to £30.27 for a forty-hour week. The take-home pay of a Claridge’s chambermaid on the picket line was, after various deductions, £23 a week. The strikers had come out for two things: recognition of their union, and the re-instatement of their shop steward, who had been sacked — victimized, according to the strikers.

As often happens in these affairs, the strikers went back empty-handed (Times, 25.4.78). The shop steward later accepted compensation from Claridge’s, but he stayed sacked, as the hotel had insisted he would. We capitalists get the best of both worlds. The hotel-workers, like the firemen, the Grunwick employees, and many more, were beaten into submission; and at the same time many workers remain entirely convinced (by the press and television) of the ungovernable power of the unions, which can therefore be blamed for the miseries of their lives.

Monday

It is absolutely essential for us that the working class do not discover what Socialism really is. In this we are much helped by the left-wing parties—the Labour Party, the Communist Party, the various Trotskyist groups—who allege that certain capitalist countries such as Britain, Russia, China, or others, are really Socialist, or could easily become so with a few more reforms. These allegations are naturally made much of by avowedly capitalist-supporting media-men. Peregrine Worsthorne had an article in the Sunday Telegraph (2.4.78) in which he commented sarcastically on James Callaghan’s stay at the British Embassy in Washington, being waited on by servants and taken round in chauffeur-driven cars. The article was called The Splendours of Socialism — in reality a completely irrelevant title, but an effective piece of propaganda — and the article went on with attacks on state capitalism (labelled “Socialism”), of which Russia and what he called the “Communist countries” were given as dreadful examples.

Worsthorne made another good propaganda point, alleging that Callaghan was living it up in a way that “no British capitalist, however successful, could hope to emulate” (who does he think stays at Claridge’s?) Thus the workers who read the paper are assured that the capitalists are not really very well off. Well done, Worsthorne!

Tuesday

With my business interests I need a pied-à-terre in town, and for the last couple of months I have been paying £500 a week rent for a furnished flat in central London—really luxurious ones bring up to £1000 a week (Times, 5.6.78 and Observer, 11.6.78). However, I have decided to get somewhere more permanent. I think 1 will go after a house in St. John’s Wood: it’s a nice size, with five bedrooms and two bathrooms, and is offered at £475,000 (Times, 9.6.78). At a modest price like that, not even half a million, of course it’s not freehold: the lease is fifty-seven years.

I’ve made a start on the furnishings. A pair of George III mahogany commodes was sold by Christie’s for £95,000 to a London dealer “on behalf of a private collector” Daily Telegraph, 16.5.78). They should look well in my new house.

Wednesday

A film starlet recently told a journalist (Sunday Express, 21.5.78) of a discovery she had made while filming The Greek Tycoon. They borrowed a luxury yacht, and she found that “there was a crew of twenty-seven to look after just eight guests. That’s all they can have on board; there are only four guest cabins. Now that’s ridiculous . .” All in all, “I realized for the first time that rich people do live lives quite different from the rest of us.”

Well, yes, my dear, we do. We have more money, you see. Some of us throw it away foolishly. Mrs. Kitty Milinaire, the Duchess of Bedford’s daughter-in-law (who was recently charged with taking away on approval from Cartiers’, the royal jewellers, a gem stone and a couple of rings worth £204,000 and not returning them, but was cleared of any blame after a court case) — Mrs. Milinaire admitted losing £3 million in five years by gambling (Daily Telegraph, 29.6.78).

Even she was slower than Sir Hugh Fraser, the millionaire industrialist, who confessed some time ago to losing one and a half million pounds on the roulette tables “in the last year or two” (Times, 8.12.76). That’s throwing away about £20,000 per week, taking the average week in, week out, for eighteen months. To get through that much he had to play several tables simultaneously, sometimes as many as five, and make his rounds continuously among them.

These, however, are exceptions. And even this money isn’t “lost”: it goes into the hands of other rich people, either fellow gamblers or casino owners.

Thursday

Poor results have been reported from one of the companies represented in my portfolio of shares. Dunbee, the toy manufacturers, didn’t do as well as expected in 1977, particularly in the last half of the year (Daily Telegraph, 16.5.78). As the joint managing director said, “Christmas didn’t happen last year". (The remark, incidentally, shows a refreshing candour as to what Christmas really amounts to in a commercial society, despite the annual dose of religious propaganda.)

The disappointing sales no doubt resulted from the fall in many people’s purchasing power owing to the failure of after-tax pay to keep pace with prices (City Comment, Daily Telegraph, 16.5.78). That is one of the many dilemmas of our society: we capitalists strain every nerve to keep our workers’ pay down, but at the same time we must bear in mind that they are our customers. It is these contradictions within capitalism which lead to struggles between political policies which take place in every capitalist country (that is, in every country in the world).

After reading the Dunbee report, I had to console myself by arranging a week’s salmon fishing—I took a week on a crack boat on the Tweed, one rod, £1000 a week (Times, 16.5.78).

Friday

My old friend Lord Lilford has triumphed in the Court of Appeal. Lord Lifford’s fourth wife, who is now married to her third husband, sued Lord Lilford (who is now married to his fifth wife) for extra provision for their two daughters. When the plaintiff and the defendant got married, Lord Lilford “made financial provision for her former husband and her two children by that marriage” (Sun, 13.5.78). When they were divorced, Lord Lilford gave his ex-wife at least £200,000 in money and properly and shares, and also handed over £30,000 for each girl’s education, plus £1812 a year each until they were eighteen. The girls’ mother thought that that was not enough, and sued the baron for another £25,000 for each girl. She won in the High Court, but Lord Lilford’s appeal has now been upheld. The former Lady Lilford said after the case: “I think he should feel very proud of himself over the trifling sum of £25,000 for each of the girls out of his untold millions.”

But it’s the principle of the thing that counts (or, as you might say, the principal—and the interest). £50,000 is neither here nor there to people like Lord Lilford and me, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

Saturday

Went shopping in the West End. Bought rather a nice little book about the various New Zealand Rugby touring teams, for my nephew, who is keen on the game. It cost £200 (Times, 12.4.78). I met my girl friend, and 1 bought her a straw hat for £68 (Times, 25.5.78), and a pair of silk pyjamas, £200 (Eastern Daily Press, 16.6.78).

Have just booked for a three-months’ cruise with the QE2 later this year. In April 900 passengers landed from a three-month Far Eastern cruise, for which they paid charges ranging from £5000 to £100,000 (and that’s apart from their spending money on the trip). They included 150 “well-heeled English gentlefolk” (Observer, 23.4.78).

Capitalism is run, naturally, for the benefit of the capitalists, but that fact must be concealed as far as possible. Thus, while some capitalists go on fantastically expensive holidays, their journalistic apologists like Worsthorne continue the task of persuading the rest of the population that no British capitalist could afford even a chauffeur- driven car.

If we members of the ruling class did not have such a vast propaganda organization working for us, how long, I wonder, would our system last?

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist (1979)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

Lord and Lady Brownlow were telling me the other day of their family financial arrangements. Their four-year-old son, Peregrine, has just inherited £3 million. As they said, he will remain “a very normal little boy”.

Someone must have eavesdropped, because now the Daily Express columnist Jean Rook (29.11.78) has seized the chance to make a cheap sneer. How can any four-year-old with £3 million be “normal”, she says. She has missed the point entirely. He is a very normal little boy by capitalist standards. What’s so special about three millionnn? Nobody said anything about him being normal from a working-class point of view.

Journalists pretend to forget that the two classes in our society are completely different. What is normal for us in the capitalist class is not, of course, normal for the rest of the population. For example, you wouldn’t find a capitalist making a cheap sneer. An expensive one, possibly.

Monday

At the club this morning we all agreed what a splendid letter dear old John Wakeham, the Conservative MP, wrote to the Daily Telegraph the other day (15.11.78). He said, in a fine peroration. “Conservatives put their country first, their party second and themselves last.” Absolutely true, we told each other, if by Conservatives you mean the upper-class people who really run the party. Some of us at the club were Labour supporters, and we all accepted it was true of Labourites and Tories alike among the ruling class How different from the workers! Someone made an impromptu speech attacking these greedy union- members, always selfishly trying to grab more devalued money—the “Gadarene rush” as one industrialist called it recently. We all enjoyed the implication that these people perpetually worried about their wages and salaries are simply swine. We had a few rounds of drinks to toast our own self-sacrifice, and the noble unselfishness of all the moneyed people like us. heroically putting their country first and themselves last. We all tried not laugh.

Tuesday

Had a few people to dinner myself this evening. Among the trimmings were half a dozen edible dormice at £39 each (from a farmer near Stockport, Sunday People, 24.12.78). a few jars of caviar at £104 a pound (Observer, 24.12.78) and a small bottle of Hungarian Tokay wine probably dating from the 1680s. which I got recently at Sotheby's for £1300 (Daily Telegraph, 14.12.78). There isn’t much eating or drinking in any of them, but it’s these little things that show your guests you have made an effort.

Wednesday

The poor old Shah of Persia! So the Iranian capitalist class has decided to ditch him. 1 warned him last winter what might happen. I was staying on Kish Island, in the Persian Gulf, where (as the Daily Telegraph put it, 11.11.78) "a complex of villas, casinos, and a luxury hotel has been built and where bevies of imported French girls act as 'maids’. Further lavish development is planned.” It is only for the upper class —"the very rich of the Gulf area, influential Persians, and the aristocracy.” Others need not apply. "Strict security screening makes certain that only the favoured are allowed into the exclusive holiday club with its £800 membership fee. a compulsory £8000 credit card and villas at rentals running into thousands." The idea is an obvious money-spinner, given the number of people around with pots of money to spend on enjoying themselves, and the Pahlavi Foundation, the Shah’s family trust, apparently provided most of the finance for setting up this paradise of extravagant pleasure for the well-heeled (Observer, 7.1.79). "The Shah and his family have spent several winter holidays at a Royal residence on the island but not at the club where the French 'maids’ sunbathe topless" (Daily Telegraph, 11.11.78).

When I stayed there I had several talks with the King of Kings, as he is (or was) known to his friends. I told him that despotism, with its censorship, its vast armed forces, and its secret police (such as the Shah’s Savak), and all the expense of jails for political prisoners, was very expensive. In Britain, I said, the ruling class was firmly in power. and our system was much cheaper. I tried to persuade him to allow freedom of speech, political association, and so on. I pointed out that under our system only the very rich could run mass newspapers and magazines, or own TV and radio companies; and with the state radio and TV also pouring out pro-capitalist propaganda continuously, the people of Britain have so far been persuaded into almost total support of capitalism. The political parties that come to the top in our system (I said) all advocate various models of capitalism, whether mainly private enterprise, mainly State-controlled, or something between the two. So capitalism is safe whichever party is in power; no expenditure is usually necessary on secret police, military tribunals, expensive political jails, or a censorship apparatus; and you can boast of your democratic freedoms, which is very useful in drumming up support for the State, both in peacetime and (even more) in wartime.

The Shah, however, said it wouldn’t work at present in Iran. Practically everyone in Britain can read, and so is subject to written propaganda: not so, yet, in Iran. Nor are TV sets as common there as here. When universal education and hire purchase have put this right, said the Shah, he would think about it.

And now it’s too late! Perhaps I'll drop a line to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the new "strong man", giving him due warning. Despotism seems more stable than democracy; really, the opposite is true.

Thursday

Have made an agreement for the first day of the shooting next season. I’ve got some nice pheasant and partridge moors for £3500 for an eight-gun syndicate, including myself. Last year the first-day bag of these moors was 700 birds. It’s getting a bit on the expensive side—in lots of places a couple of good days after the pheasants will cost you well over £500 per gun (Daily Telegraph, 11.12.78). Last season I got up a little party and we took a 10,000-acre estate pheasants and partridges for £20,000.

I like imagining I'm knocking over some of these damned strikers or picketers when I’m after the game. Each pheasant I kill, I say to myself—that’s another of these idle trouble-makers accounted for! Shooting’s too good for some of them.

Friday

A lot of unnecessary fuss in Denmark. The Danish Minister of Education. Mrs. Ritt Bjerregard. went to Paris for a Unesco conference, and her expenses for a thirteen-day stay were £5,700 (Daily Telegraph, 23.12.78). The Danish PM told her to pay part herself, and when she refused, sacked her.

A storm in a teacup. £5700 is nothing out of the ordinary—I've spent much more than that in two weeks in Paris! If this Mrs. Bjerregard is a member of the capitalist class, she could easily pay it herself; if not. she shouldn't have enjoyed herself on that scale.

The truth is. the Minister seems to have been enjoying herself as if she were rich, when she wasn’t.

Saturday

Though democracy has many advantages for the ruling class in advanced Western societies, it is not without its drawbacks. Sometimes I wonder if the rival political parties don’t go too far in their battles to secure the fruits of office. There’s no denying that some awkward facts do leak out occasionally.

Mr. Callaghan and most of his ministers have committed themselves to the thesis that the working class causes inflation through pay-increases, which is their defence when they are criticized over the continuing rise in prices. Of course we in the ruling class know that this claim is nonsensical, but it is good propaganda and makes for exciting newspaper stories against the greedy proles. But in their haste to discredit Callaghan's lot and grab place and power for themselves, some Tories have been prepared to show up Callaghan's naive errors, even at the expense of abandoning a first class anti-worker argument. The Daily Telegraph published a middle-page article recently (15.11.78) in which the author pointed out that rising wages cannot push up the price of goods unless the Government validates increased prices by printing more money . . . That this is clearly true is suggested by the fact that many firms have been unable to recoup rising labour costs by increased prices: for if prices could always be raised by as much as costs rose, no firm need ever lose money.” A week later (22.11.78) another middle-page article recalled the real reason why Governments of all kinds have continuously and deliberately inflated the currency for the last forty years: "Keynes persuaded a whole generation that by expanding the money supply and generating mild inflation, thereby reducing real wages, it would be possible to circumvent union opposition to necessary wage-reductions.”

Now we all know that these are the facts of the case. The Telegraph writers have exposed Callaghan—either he has been deliberately doing one thing and saying another (whatever you call that kind of behaviour), or he is painfully ignorant of elementary economics. But supposing the workers get to know of this? Most trade union leaders who appear on the TV hasten to register their agreement with Callaghan’s claptrap. self-evidently fallacious though it is, and grovellingly apologize for their members who have gone on strike hoping to regain the standard of living they thought they had agreed to work for a year ago, is it wise to abandon such a splendid weapon, which the newspapers continually use to pillory the workers?

When Mrs. Thatcher gets to Number Ten she may probably want to use the same argument, blaming the unions for the inevitable results of the state’s Keynesian economics: I hope she won’t find the ground has been cut from under her feet.

Alwyn Edgar

Diary of a Capitalist (1979)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

I am staying the weekend with my old friends, the Tavistocks, at Woburn Abbey. The Duke and Duchess of Bedford live in France now, so their eldest son and heir, the Marquis of Tavistock, runs the Abbey. Went for a little spin in an Aston Martin Lagonda that the Marchioness bought the Marquis last year as a seventeenth wedding anniversary present, for £32,000. Nice to see couples who remember these occasions with little gifts. It’s the thought that counts. (Daily Telegraph, 29.5.79)

Monday

A man at Sotheby’s was telling me they sold a case of Romance Conti ’71 recently — a fine wine, but not yet very rare — for £850, and another auction house, Bonham’s, got £580 a case for some ’53 Cheval Blanc (The Observer, 11.2.79). The highest price Sotheby’s ever got was last year, when a Washington wine merchant gave them £8,300 for a single bottle of Lafite. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up with a wealthy friend of mine in California: last time I visited him, he showed me round his bomb-proof cellar shelter, lined with bins of rare burgundies and clarets. After all, if you can afford to buy protection against high explosive in a future attack while the less privileged are dying up above, you might as well enjoy yourself while you wait for the All-Clear.

Tuesday

Lunched with a friend at his club. A chap at the next table was sounding off about how ‘those of us in the upper class’ should stick together. Now I know for a fact that he owns virtually nothing — nothing, that is, that brings him in any income; his pay is twelve or fifteen thousand a year, no more, as a manager in someone else’s factory.

“He’s just a worker’’, I said to my friend, “merely a glorified foreman. If the business closes down, he gets the sack like the rest of them.”

But my friend — who is one of us; he owns companies, like I do — pointed out that this chap’s ideas were all to the good. And of course, on reflection I had to agree. Lots of these white-collar workers, office-wallahs, ‘professional men’, almost anyone who doesn’t actually stand at a factory bench all day, are convinced they are a cut above all the others — all the artisans and worse who dirty their hands, and clock on, and get paid on a Friday. And being convinced they’re different, they feel hostile to the other lot, refusing to co-operate voluntarily in any way, and probably vote Conservative, while most of the people with overalls and dirty hands vote Labour. As my friend says, it’s just what we want! If they all realised they were workers (with different sized wages and salaries and different stresses and strains, but all workers) they would get together and overthrow capitalism, and build a system which benefitted themselves, not us. It’s the old story — divide and rule.

Wednesday

Day out at Epsom, for the Derby. Not a cheap day, what with the admission to the stand, the grub and the champers, and my contributions to the bookies. I had a pony on every race, and didn’t pick a winner. It cost me £216 just to get there, a return flight by helicopter from Central London. Still, as a man on my flight said (Daily Telegraph, 7.6.79), it was worth it just to see all the struggling humanity below, stuck in the traffic jams.

Thursday

Bought a grouse moor in Northumberland — shooting rights over 5,491 acres, and a hill farm of 491 acres. Well over a thousand brace have been shot in the average year; last year’s bag was 1,320 brace. The paper (Daily Telegraph, 1.6.79) said it was bought “on behalf of a British buyer” — that was me. It’s probably an economy in the long run; it’s getting very expensive even for a couple of weeks’ shooting in the autumn. We’re all entitled to relax some time.

Friday

The newspapers that 1 and my friends own naturally keep up our campaign about how all-powerful the unions are getting, in order to make absolutely sure they never get any real power, and also to provide a handy scapegoat for any worker who is unhappy with his necessarily property-less position in society. Hitler, if I remember rightly, ran a similar campaign about how powerful the Jews were getting, for the same reasons. But I sometimes come across fellow-capitalists who have actually begun to half-believe their own propaganda. It’s important for the prosperity of capitalism that we distinguish between what we tell the admass, and what we know are the facts.

Take several news items in the last day or two. The bakers’ union annual conference decided to hold a ballot before calling another strike, an acknowledgement of the failure of last winter’s strike, which the employers won hands down. The Tower Hamlets social workers decided to end their ten-month strike; if they have obtained any improvement on the offer they got in February, it isn’t visible to the naked eye. (Sixty of them left their jobs during the strike; they will not be replaced.) The kitchen staff at Wellington School, after a three-week strike, gave up their claim and returned to work — or tried to; they found their jobs had gone. The outside catering company which actually employs the women had cancelled its contract, and the school was able to say triumphantly that it was making other arrangements. Again, one of the Nottingham Evening Post’s journalists sacked last December for joining the NUJ provincial journalists’ strike (so they not only failed to win their claimed pay rise but lost their jobs too) was told by a Nottingham industrial tribunal that his dismissal was perfectly fair — “If all employees who take part in a strike or other form of industrial action are dismissed or not re-engaged, the dismissal is automatically fair.” (all these items. Daily Telegraph, 7.6.79 and 8.6.79).

A few days earlier, a despatch written by Sir Nicholas Henderson (the new British Ambassador to Washington) was ‘leaked’. Henderson was worried about Britain’s ‘decline’, as seen from his previous job as Ambassador in Paris. Compared with France and Germany, he said, “not only are real wages lower but hours of work are longer”; besides that, working conditions are worse. Sir Nicholas has read about the omnipotent British trades unions, and he called this strange result “the paradox of the British labour scene”. But there is no paradox; we must judge by results. Sir Nicholas should reflect and discover the real reason for what puzzles him: we capitalists are much the stronger in our battle against the trades unions, because as long as capitalism lasts, power resides — naturally enough — with the capitalists.

Saturday

Sad to see that Jackson’s, the Royal grocers in Piccadilly, are closing down. They can’t afford the rent for a new lease of the premises. Many’s the feed of truffles, caviar and pate I have had from Jackson’s. However, as Buckingham Palace said, there’s always Harrods and Fortnums. But while I thought of it, I went round for several jars of their Beluga caviar; I am very partial to it, and it’s only £144 a pound.

On the way back I cheered myself up by buying a new watch; a Rolex Oystcrquartz with rather a nice case of white gold, for £4,116 (The Observer, 25.3.79).

Alwyn Edgar

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