Sting in the Tail: Their Problems . . . (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Problems . . .

David Mellor's little lapse certainly hogged the headlines, but another story concerning more serious lapses by political leaders was tucked away inside The Guardian (25 July).

Professor Hugh Freeman, a prominent psychiatrist, told a meeting of fellow shrinks In Dublin that world statesmen have often been:

Incapable of exercising normal decision-making powers through abnormalities of brain functioning.

According to the Prof., Prime Minister Anthony Eden was heavily into booze and drugs during the 1956 Suez crisis and "was not fit to be In charge of national affairs at that time”: US President Woodrow Wilson was "severely mentally handicapped" for the last year of his term: Stalin ended up "so irrational" that he could have started World War 3, while JFK was almost certainly taking steroids and amphetamines during the Cuban missile crisis. The Profs case is made and he didn’t even mention Hitler!

As the poet wisely put it:

Great men are great In our eyes -

While we kneel.

Let us rise!

. . . Our Solution

Is it any wonder that 'World Statesmen" go barmy? Consider the hassle George Bush faces over the proposed sale of 5 billion dollars worth of US fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

If the deal goes through he risks outraging the Israelis and, in this election year, the Jewish American vote, if it doesn’t go through then 30,000 defence industry jobs will be lost along with who knows how many votes.

Of course, he could buy-off the Israelis and their supporters by granting Israel the 10 billion dollar loan guarantees he has been holding out on, but this will not pacify the American arms control groups: how, they ask, can Bush claim to be promoting Middle East peace and sell arms there at the same time?

All heads of government constantly face such mind-bending problems: let's save the poor souls from their mental anquish by relieving them of all that decision-making and simply re-organise society for the benefit of humanity.

Footloose Faldo

Most days that Scorpion gets up he is quite pleased to find a pair of boots to wear. Sometimes he feels lucky just finding his feet.

That is not the case with Nick Faldo, recent winner of the British Open Golf Championship. Mr. Faldo has been paid £100,000 a year since 1989 to wear Stylo Matchmaker shoes during televised tournaments. Turns out that the naughty Faldo wore Footjoys shoes In his recent triumph. Stylo are not best pleased.

There is talk of-some action being taken which is understandable considering Stylo's holding company lost £9 million last year.

It says a lot about capitalism when even an enjoyable pursuit like an afternoon on a golf course has been turned into just another business opportunity for the money grubbers. Everything capitalism touches It spoils.

That's History

Are you baffled by the complexity of the ethnic mix of Eastern Europe and how it got that way? Then Malcolm Bradbury's description of an imaginary Eastern European country in his satirical novel "Rates of Exchange" could give you a clue:

It is a land that has . . . been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, Indeed almost every tribe or race specialist In pillage and rape, have been here . . . and left behind their imprint, their customs, their faiths, their architecture, their genes . . . And so its culture Is a melting pot, Its language a pot-pourri, Its people a salad.

So how do those "ethnic-cleansers" square all that with their racial nonsense?

All In The Game

Labour and Conservatives are fond of pretending that they are radically different from each other. Really, of course, it is all a bit of a game.

John Biffen, Tory MP writing in The Guardian (21 July) and discussing John Smith's future prospects had this to say:

He will have to provide a convincing policy alternative . . . He will be under great constraint to do this particularly as Labour's public spending and interest rates policies broadly reflect those of the Conservatives.

It Never Fails

Recently we saw a poster for an SWP meeting entitled "Will The Economy Ever Recover?" We saw it too late to hear what the speaker had to say, but our answer to that question is, yes, the economy will recover.

This will happen for several reasons: One is that the present slump will eventually bring down interest rates to the point where companies find it attractive enough to borrow in order to invest: another is that growing unemployment exerts downward pressure on wages and this will also attract employers.

Then the property crash means that factory, warehouse and office space can be had cheaply, and because of production cut-backs stocks will become depleted and need replacing, while companies will be able to buy the plant and machinery of bankrupt competitors at knock-down prices.

Factors like these will encourage capital to invest again in production because of the prospects for bigger profits and the economy will have recovered. Every slump contains the seed of the next boom and vice-versa.

Capitalism pollutes the planet (1990)

From the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is generally accepted that a greenhouse effect has been and is being created and that the ozone layer above the Earth is being dangerous depleted, both representing enormous potential disasters looming up for the not-so-future generations. Socialists argue that the fault lies with the capitalist system and its blinkered, all-consuming quest for the maximisation of profit from its industrial and commercial output.

The threat of global warming is the result of perhaps a century of the pouring of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by capitalist industry while the ozone situation is attributable to the massive use of CFCs since the 1950s as a cheap and easy-to-produce chemical serving many industrial and domestic purposes.

We do not ask you to take the Socialist's word for it that it is capitalism's motivation with profit and therefore with cost that is the fundamental cause of present environmental problems. W. Fay, administrator of the influential US industrial lobby grouping, says “congressional environmental bills must pass the affordability test’’ (Time, 16 April). In plain language this means if it costs a lot, pare it down, compromise, cut corners, think about it again, fight a rearguard action, anything in fact except putting human concern first. For in capitalism the bottom-line of profit is the all-important factor. If you have any doubts on this turn to the financial pages of the “quality’’ press and just glance at the long list of companies all parading the latest gains and losses in their stocks. Then turn to the accompanying pages and peruse the analysts' comments and considerations of the various companies to invest in. These will have nothing whatsoever to do with the usefulness of the products being produced or even whether these are vital to human life. Profit and profit alone is the god, and this hysteria pervades the whole of the global financial world and is now a 24- hour frenetic international affair.

Business as usual

President Bush heads the biggest capitalist state in the world and in his election campaign liked to term himself the “environmental president". Once in office he has found governing more difficult. Now he is pursuing “a balance" between sharply competing interests on environmental issues. Urged on by John Sununu, White House Chief of Staff, and Richard Darman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, “who have viewed environmental protection with scepticism if it impugned on economic growth", Bush told an international conference in Washington on global warming "that more study was needed to help resolve ‘uncertainties’ about the effect of global warming and the costs of pollution control" (International Herald-Tribune, 21 March). Translated, this means ‘take it easy, not too fast, don’t lets go round spending a lot of money’.

The same paper had earlier reported (6 March) that each year US manufacturers belch thousands of tons of ozone-depleting chemicals into the stratosphere. Until last year IBM's circuit-board plant, one of the largest users of these chemicals in the US. released more than two million pounds annually. Even though these emissions have been reduced as a result of regulations:

According to the National Resources Defense Council two chemicals that are as yet unregulated—methyl chloroform and tetrochloride—together account for 33 percent of man-made ozone-destroying chlorine in the stratosphere . . . As long as these are used the ozone will be unable to recover even if CFCs are phased out entirely', said a spokeswoman for the group and she continued that although 200 companies reported less methyl chloroform emissions in 1988 almost as many others increased emissions’.

Methyl chloroform, the report went on, is still used by IBM because no substitute has yet been found. Just imagine finding out you were being fed on a slow poison but then being told this would have to continue till a substitute was found!

D. A. Hayes, an organiser of Earth Day that took place on 25 April, spoke of the last ten years as “a decade of greed, sleaze and mendacity". Yes, indeed they were, but you would need to be motivated by unbounded optimism to think that the problems of the environment can be terminated whilst leaving the capitalist profit motive firmly in place:

Although environmental issues are now firmly on the political agenda in many countries action to clean up the earth is rare . . . because it is costly. A pledge by the seven wealthiest industrial nations last summer to undertake concerted and determined action to help the environment has so far achieved nothing. This week the EPA released figures indicating that US plants spewed 4.57 billion pounds of poisonous chemicals into the air, land and water in 1988. (International Herald-Tribune, 21 March).

This is not the complete picture because the Environmental Protection Agency requires reports only from industries discharging more than 50,000 pounds of the chemicals that are considered most harmful to humans or the environment. Los Angeles, for example, is being overwhelmed by foul air, trash, and water shortages. The EPA has also reported 112 million people—nearly half the US population-living in areas still exceeding the smog standards (Time, 16 April).

Same the whole world over

The problem of “balancing”, as Bush called weighting up cost versus environment, affects the whole world, in Australia only one of Sydney's 35 beaches is free of pollution. Many of the others, including Bondi and Manly, are frequently fouled by household sewage and industrial waste. The sewage contains significant amounts of toxic chemicals and heavy metals such as mercury and lead but "the government authorities in Sydney have been reluctant to risk unpopularity by putting up taxes and being tough on industrial waste discharges" (International Herald-Tribune, 1 April). This is pretty much the tale round the globe.

There is an obverse side: 'where there's muck there's brass'. Capital will seek investment high or low and recruit every laudable human sentiment to justify its activity. That's why we re all green now:

Spinning gold from garbage is the alchemy of the 1990s. That's the message to entice investors into targeting environment-control companies. Cleaning up our polluted planet will be the growth industry of the 90s says D. McKercher of the Oppenheimer Global Environment Fund. Government spending on environmental programs could soar providing a bonanza for well-positioned companies. (International Herald-Tribune, 9 April).

It is just as though the capitalist monster had spawned a parasite to feed on its maggoty and putrefying flesh.

So one suggestion we could put to capitalist investors is to split their money between the polluting industries and the cleaning-up ones. That way would provide a never-ending round-about of profit-taking. Facetious? Perhaps, but that's certainly the face that capitalism presents. Socialists have a much more logical suggestion. Why not dispose of the society which is self-evidently responsible for the appalling pollution of the world environment? Stop the terrible mess being made in the first place and then there'll be no clearing up to do. That saves resources twice over.

To the millions expressing their support for Earth Days and joining in parades, planting trees, recycling waste, and taking part in nature walks and demonstrations. we say consider whether a profit motivation of production can be reconciled with a clean planet. Taking the evidence put forward in this article as being just a tiny corner of the general picture of the rapacity of the capitalist system, ask yourself whether the answer can truly be an affirmative one.

Max Judd

Whither Iraq? (1999)

From the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a letter last November to Sir John Weston at the Permanent Mission of the UK at the UN, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark lambasted the sanctions decimating Iraqi society as a “violation of the Genocide Convention”. Iraq, he argued posed no real threat to the region and the idea that it did was a “false fantasy created by the US to justify its vast military presence in the region, to dominate the oil resources and to contain Islam”.

Weston’s comments were not unique. He was quite simply echoing what others have been saying for some time, most notably Richard Halliday, whose high-profile resignation as head of the UN’s humanitarian relief programme in Iraq alarmed the warmongers in Washington and London.

Speaking through the Guardian in late February, Halliday voiced his belief that the military threat from Iraq was greatly exaggerated, a “cop-out”, before criticising the West for 8 years of sanctions that have crippled Iraq far greater than any aerial bombardment endured by the country.

Halliday has pointed out that the sanctions violate the Geneva Convention as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Rights of the Child, that they have seriously disrupted the quality of life in Iraq and debased a general high standard of behaviour practised by the common Iraqi people.

If the bombing of Iraq no longer makes front-page news—the 8 March US attack, for instance, only made page 12 of the Guardian under “News in brief”—then it can well be imagined that the common people elsewhere, particularly in Britain and the US, know little or nothing of the 1.2 million children who died as a result of the UN sanctions against Iraq between August 1990 and August 1997, or of the 6,000 who continue to die each week as a result of malnutrition and disease.

While the bombing of Iraqi sites has become an almost daily occurrence for the warplanes of Globocop and its lobotomised sidekick, the UK, the sanctions are the real weapons that continue to blight the lives of the Iraqi people.

Infant mortality rates have increased six-fold since 1996. Fifty percent of the Iraqi population has no access to clean water and the majority exist on a starvation diet, while sanitation has become a luxury.

Iraq’s per capita income has dropped from $2,900 a year to $60 a year and inflation has increased to unparalleled levels. According to the FAO, the price of wheat flour, once part of the staple Iraqi diet, has gone up 1.16 million percent since 1990. The health service is in ruins with surgery often conducted in unsterile conditions and with no anaesthetic because of the embargo on supplies.

Medical necessities are not all that is prohibited by Security Council export restrictions. The list also includes children’s clothing, adhesive tape, books, dolls, spectacles, bags and footballs—the kind of everyday items the more ingenious Iraqis could use to knock US F16s out of the skies!

Meanwhile the aerial bombardment of Iraqi targets continues apace. Missile attacks are now almost daily occurrences and have been since Operation Desert Fox back in December of last year—incidentally the biggest USA/UK joint attack in the region since the Gulf War eight years ago and one that even the less cynical could not fail to notice came as we were expected to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As he accepted his presidential nomination in 1988, George Bush had this to say:

“This has been called the American Century because in it we were the dominant force for good in the world. Now we are on the verge of a new century and what country’s name will be bear? I say it will be another American Century.”

These words, better than all the cant that has been used to justify US aggression has against Iraq, best sum up the real US mission in the Gulf. The US, and Britain for that matter—which never got used to losing its world power status after World War II—are defending no moral high ground. They police the no-fly zones on behalf of no neighbour of Saddam and certainly do not defend us from someone who threatens global peace.

The US attacks are being carried out to remind us of their military prowess and at the bequest of their corporate elite. They are bombing Iraq to remind anyone watching that the 21st century—like the one we are witnessing coming to a close—will be ruled by force and that it will be they, the US, who will be calling the shots.

You don’t have to read many books by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and ES Herman to realise the US has been, and still is, the number one rogue state this century, bullying its way across the international stage, imposing their will on anyone not tough enough to stand their corner. A cursory look at the black eyes dished out in the past 50 years by the US and its sidekick is enough to tell us which foot the boot will be on in the coming century.

Why Iraq? Well in place of the “Communist threat” what other propaganda framework best serves US interests and kills two birds with one stone? Saddam, as the unpredictable madman the US has conditioned us to believe he is, has to be punished. He thus provides the US with a perfect pretext for keeping the military machine alert on “our” behalf and to further condition us to accept similar US-led responses in the future. Moreover, the US presence gives Washington tighter control over the region’s oil supplies—something the US state department refers to as the “greatest material prize in world history”.

With a world shortage of not only oil but also water predicted for the 21st century, and with both resources high up on the agenda of all Middle East countries, it’s a certainty the coming century will see, if anything, an increased US presence in the region and a more aggressive stance on the international stage.

John Bissett

Sting in the Tail: Open Letter (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Open Letter

The Scorpion's Nest, 

52 Clapham High Street 

1 February 1991

To David Bellamy,

Botanist and TV Personality 

Dear David,

We read how you told the annual conference of the CBI that, instead of cutting their profits, environmental care could, by using "new technologies", bring them new profits.

Bet this went down well with the manufacturers of the necessary equipment (Mr Heseltine told the conference that the market for this could be worth billions) but possibly the companies you hope will buy it weren’t quite so enthusiastic.

You see, David, capitalism is a very competitive system and every company must keep its costs down even at the expense of the environment. That's why we have pollution but maybe you knew that?

And those profits you spoke so approvingly of, they are the unpaid labour of the useful class In society. It's legal robbery, David, but perhaps you didn’t know that?

Anyway, although we enjoy your TV programmes it's obvious to us that you know more about the environment than you do about the economic laws of capitalism which make such a mess of It.

Words of Wisdom

  "The 1960s were good years for liberalism; a fair amount of money was spent on poverty programs and relatively nothing happened. Enter new leaders and new priorities. Why didn't earlier programs work? Two possibilities are open:

1. We didn't spend enough money, we didn't make sufficient creative efforts, or (and this makes any established leader jittery) we cannot solve these problems without a fundamental social and economic transformation of society; or 2. the programs failed because their recipients are inherently what they are — blaming the victims."

(Stephen Jay Gould in Ever Since Darwin Page 47.)

Dismal Johnny

The press made great play of the different style of government we could expect with the demise of Margaret Thatcher and the advent of John Major.

Mrs Thatcher, it was said, was the hard-edged, no-nonsense type of prime minister while Mr Major would prove to be a decent, compassionate man with a social conscience.

A couple of years ago Mrs Thatcher in one of her photo opportunity visits to the depressed North East of England reprimanded demonstrators and branded the unemployed as "Moaning Minnies". In January Mr Major claimed that such problems as rising unemployment and evictions were being exaggerated by "Dismal Jimmies".

His speech to Newcastle businessmen was made on 8 January. Next morning It was announced that the Ravenscraig Steel Mill In Lanarkshire was to close with the loss of 1,200 Jobs.

Doubtlessly there will be some Moaning Minnies and Dismal Jimmies among the ungrateful families of steel workers who will fall to appreciate the different styles of Thatcher and Major.

Bitter Harvest

George Bush began the year with a visit down-under during which he extolled the "warm kinship" between Americans and Australians.

But when angry Australian farmers demonstrated against US subsidies to American farmers which they claim costs them 1 billion dollars a year in lost overseas markets, the "warm kinship"rapidly cooled.

Bush told the demonstrators:

  While I don't like having to use these remedies, I will safeguard the Interests of American farmers.

The Guardian 3 January 

So free-marketeer Bush defends subsidies to American farmers while at the same time he is bitterly denouncing the EEC for subsidising Its farmers

1992 will provide the usual bumper crop of bare-faced, hypocritical politicians. That is one harvest that never falls!

Hard to Credit

The news that Canada's Labourites, the New Democratic Party, had won the provincial elections In British Columbia was interesting only because the party they ousted was the Social Credit Party.

Social Credit was a 1930's movement whose case was built around the notion that banks "create credit" by lending money they do not have. Why, they argued, shouldn't governments do the same? The resulting increase in purchasing power would bring prosperity, banish slumps, etc.

Parties holding this view sprang up all over the world but although most of them have vanished some modern books on banking and economics still peddle the nonsense that banks lend more than they have, so this unsound theory is still around and not only In Canada.

Still Clueless

Channel Four's "A Week In Politics" (22 December) had four Labour ex-cabinet ministers discussing the problems a Labour government will face if elected. Present were Tony Benn, Denis Healey, Barbara Castle and Merlyn Rees and they went at it with typical sound and fury.

Benn said Labour must "face-down" International finance and not the unions but Healey replied that "excessive union demands" must be resisted and cited some left-wing councils who wore currently doing that.

"Labour should spend its way out of recession" said Benn, but Healey rubbished this and warned that people might have to "make sacrifices". Castle claimed Labour could finance extra spending by cutting ’Tory waste" while Rees urged a return to Keynesian intervention.

So despite the lessons of decades in cabinet and over 100 years as MPs between them, the four still believe, whatever their differences, that Labour can solve capitalism's contradictions. Some people never learn.

Happy Families

The new statistical bulletin Homicide In Scotland 1986 - 90 reveals that of the 589 people accused of killing in Scotland during that period only 193 were strangers to the victims.

A further 271 were lovers, friends or acquaintances of those killed, but the other 125 comprised 45 husbands or wives, 32 sons or daughters, 23 parents, 4 brothers or sisters and 21 other relatives!

So our own families are among the most dangerous people we know and yet capitalism's apologists tell us that the nuclear family "holds together the fabric of society".

Is a fourth world war inevitable? (1991)

From the March 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let us start on some points we can agree about:

• The war in the Gulf is about oil and profits. not freedom, justice or decency.
• The right of the Kuwaiti rulers to exist as a nation-state is of no concern to workers anywhere; nation-states represent the interests of the rival capitalist gangs that exist under the profit system not those of the wealth-producing majority.
• The “allies” who now attack the dictator Saddam Hussein are hypocrites who used to arm the Iraqi dictatorship when they thought it was in their interests to do so.
• The soldiers on both sides in this war are wage slaves in uniform, dying pointlessly for their masters' interests. Workers have nothing to gain from fighting on behalf of the capitalists.
• This war is causing deaths, injuries, suffering and fear which a sanely organised world would avoid.

Socialists are not alone in recognising these points. Despite the mind-destroying propaganda of the pro-war media, there are hundreds of thousands of workers in Britain, across Europe, in the USA and in the Gulf states who know that the Gulf war is a war for the control of oil. which has little to do with what the ruling class say it is about.

It is fundamentally important that socialists are not lone voices in a global wilderness in which everyone else is totally conned by capitalist lies. The existence of a vocal anti-war movement is proof that we workers have brains of our own and will not always fall prey to the lies of our rulers.

The problem is that so much of the anti-war rhetoric is confined to the futile hope of ending wars within the capitalist system. This is as hopeless as trying to end street crime in the midst of urban slums and mass poverty. The hard fact is that wars—all wars—are effects of a cause. Just as the mugger is the effect of the brutalising, alienated social environment of urban capitalism, so war is the effect of a system of persistent rivalry over raw materials, resources (including oil), markets and exploitable territories and populations. This persistent rivalry is inherent to the world capitalist system. The profit system without competing, plundering and—when push comes to shove—fighting rival gangs of capitalists could not exist. If you accept capitalism you must accept that there will be wars.

Within the anti-war movement there are some serious misconceptions. There are those who call upon the capitalist owners of the Earth to act morally. The United Nations is seen as a moralising force, coming along to capitalist gangsters who take their rivalry too far and telling them off. This does not work. No force on Earth can make the capitalists relegate commercial advantage to humanitarian concerns. At a recent anti-war demonstration in London a group of Christians on the outskirts of the crowd were praying for peace. They might just as well play dominoes for peace; war is not a matter for mythical spirits in the sky to solve. Then there are the left-wing sects whose own Leninist theology is akin to religious dogma, who argue that any enemy of the American and British ruling class must be a friend. So it is that the SWP have stated that they hope Saddam gives America a bloody nose (as if it is Saddam doing the fighting rather than the poor, frightened Iraqi conscripts, and as if the recipients of the bloody nose will be the parasites of Wall Street) and the RCP urges workers to take sides with Iraq. What utter confusion these self-appointed leaders of the working class cause.

War will not be ended by wishing it away or by taking sides. For the effect to be removed its cancerous cause must be destroyed. This is the case for socialist revolution. Nothing short will lead to a peaceful world.

After this war
With naivety and hypocrisy combined, the politicians talk of how the defeat of Saddam will lead to peace. Do they expect us to have forgotten the First World War which they called ‘‘the war to end all wars”? The British Empire and its allies won; Germany was humiliated and the Kaiser overthrown. In the aftermath of war the League of Nations promised a new world order of peaceful national co-existence. In 1939 the world was at war again. Once more, we were told that Hitler must be defeated at all costs. Victory for the Allies would mean no more Hitlers. One of the Allies was Stalin and. after the defeat of Hitler, his dictatorship controlled vast areas of Europe that had not been its victims before the war. Was this a defeat for dictatorship? Of course not. After the Second World War came the United Nations with its grand promises. In reality, the UN has been a tool of the most powerful capitalist nations and that is why its resolutions. ranging from that condemning the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, have been worthless. In Vietnam the American Empire claimed to be making the world safe for democracy. Today the Vietnamese workers live under a hideous dictatorship and the Cambodians live under constant threat from the vicious Khmer Rouge now armed and funded by the West.

George Bush, who was head of the CIA when Saddam began massacring the Kurds, and who was an oil multi-millionaire in his twenties, speaks of the New World Order which will follow the defeat of Iraq. Is this new order going to benefit the unelected, tyrannical monarchs of the Arab states who are Bush’s allies in this war? Will it benefit Gorbachov, the most centralised power-holder in the Russian Empire since Stalin? Will it benefit the butchers of Tiananmen Square who still rule over a fifth of the world’s population? Will it benefit the Turkish rulers who have locked up trade unionists in hellish prisons, but are on "our" side because they allow bombing raids on Baghdad from their air bases? Will it include the Israeli rulers who have imposed a curfew on over a million Palestinians for over a month? And if these are to be the beneficiaries of this "new world order", then one thing is for sure: times will be even worse for the workers of the world.

Worse to come
World capitalism is completely out of control. It is. as the Socialist Party has always said, a system of economic and social anarchy. Only a year ago the more naive capitalists were rejoicing at the coming of peace in our time. The Cold War was over; the good items were here; there was Eastern Europe to plunder and the future looked rosy. No sooner had the talk of the "peace dividend" made the headlines than war was on the agenda. Once again high dividends are to be derived from arms investment. Capitalism has no power to prevent wars from happening or from predicting when they will come. There is a reason for this

Capitalism is an unplanned system. Each company chases after profits, quite without any care of how this affects others. Each nation-state (which is a gang of capitalist thieves dominating one territory) carries on regardless of the rest. International treaties count for nothing when it comes to it. Iraq is party to the treaty forbidding the use of biological and chemical weapons. The USA has signed treaties making nuclear war illegal and this makes not a scrap of difference to the implicit threats of nuclear attack which they have made. Likewise, treaties of international friendship count for nothing: Jordan is committed to alliance with Britain, but this has not stopped Jordanian support for Iraq; the so-called European Community has fallen apart in the fragmented national responses to the war. Capitalist "agreements" are as reliable as one between Al Capone and Bugsy Malone.

There are over 160 nations in the world today. All of them are capitalist; there could be no such thing as a "socialist country". Each is armed. Each will fight for its economic interests. As world capitalism develops, more and more of these nations will threaten other nations. More will obtain nuclear technology and other awful weaponry with which they can threaten the rest of the world. In the long run, it seems very unlikely that nuclear and chemical weapons will not be used, by design or accident.
In addition to the multitude of legalised national gangs, there are vast numbers of would-be national groups. These are referred to by the legalised gangsters as terrorists. In fact, all warfare is terrorism. As world capitalism continues, more of these will obtain the capacity to blow up larger and larger areas. Today the IRA can bomb Downing Street; who is to say that five years from now the IRA, ETA or the PLO will not have biological or nuclear weapons? Certainly, the current holders of these disgusting weapons are in no moral position to tell their weaker power rivals that such weaponry is a bad thing to have.

With the ending of the Cold War, when the world was largely threatened by two giant superpowers, the planet Earth is not more secure. We are far less secure. Now we are entering a period in which the right to be a world power is spreading; weapons of mass destruction are escalating; the possibility of passing arms limitation agreements is less credible than ever.

It may be that the war in the Gulf will be the first act of a Third World War. If Saddam is defeated only a fool could be cheered by the likely rise of Assad of Syria as a new Middle Eastern super-ruler. The extent to which this conflict will destroy vast areas of the world is unknown. In one sense, it is almost too late to worry about that. More important is the prospect of the next war after this one. We can be sure that there will be another war if capitalism goes on. We can be sure that the more world battles there are the more unthinkable military results will become compulsively thinkable. The question is not whether there will be another war. but which of several likely areas it will be in and when it will commence.

It is important that workers oppose the current war, but such opposition alone amounts to crying in the dark. Only by dealing at root with the cause of war can the world ever be safe. Only an anti-capitalism movement can be an effective anti-war movement. This may sound like too huge a task. The awful consequences of failing in that task should motivate every reader to play their active part in ridding the world of the war-creating system before the system rids the world of humanity.

Steve Coleman

After the Slaughter . . . (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A terrible pall of acrid smoke hangs over the city. Noise! Nowhere to shelter from the noise; the noise of the explosions in the air, the noise of the 2000 kilogramme missiles. The voice of the reporter had said they were so accurately aimed that they could hit a garage door. There would be few garage doors left—and few people alive within a quarter mile of each exploding door.

Noise! Buildings crumbling, crushing human bodies; men, women and children. The small sounds of screams and sobbing—the noises we humans make in terror—blotted out by the exploding anti-aircraft shells and the screech of the multi-billion dollar technology that has been scrupulously devised to destroy lives and property. Mothers' boys, trained with the precision of surgeons, fly these things and will be called heroes—but not by their victims.

Fire, adding its terrible consuming roar to the awful cacophony of terror, laps at homes, at the unpaid-for paraphernalia of living that brings joy and sorrow even to these we are told are our enemies—our enemies deserving of this. Here is hell! Hell where human flesh adds its stench to the untreated sewage that the fantastic flying technology spreads on the streets. Hell, where people who look like us, feel like us, weep like us and die like us, are marginal counters in this orgy of absolute desolation that is happening because people in power have clashed over interests that have no bearing on the lives of those who are dying—or, even, on the lives of those who are killing them.

Who is visiting this terror on these people? Who is responsible for the war—murder of all these innocent men, women and children? Well . . . actually . . . all this, we are told, is the work of the world’s peace-keeping body, the United Nations Organisation!

Throughout the world we watch. Television has created a grand amphitheatre in which this drama of destruction can be played out before an audience that must be even greater, surely, than that which watched last year’s World Cup. My daughter’s child says "turn if off, Grandad”. As I flick the remote control she says, with precocious discernment, "I wouldn't love my daddy if he was killing people!” Channel Three is telling us that the clergy are organising prayers for those involved in the killing. Over to Channel One where the local news tells us that some IRA idiot had put a parcel bomb on a bridge and had been roundly condemned by both the clergy and a government Minister.

How do you tell a child?

The child is too wise to be given excuses. How do you tell a child that in the world where, hopefully, she will become an adult there are things called fighting forces which exist to kill people and destroy property. In every country, as surely as there is a piece of coloured cloth to represent the way the people are supposed to be different, there are fighting forces—men and women trained to kill and destroy. The very young could not understand that: only after we have been "educated", trained and conditioned in the values of capitalism and its divisive nationalism, does the notion that it is reasonable to train to kill one another become acceptable.

But this fighting force transcends those of a nation; this, we are told, is the greatest force ever assembled. Its weaponry is staggering and, had its cost been applied to the things that human beings really need, every country in the world would have first-rate hospitals and no one would be denied, or have to wait for, treatment; in addition, the housing problems of all the nation-states that make up this force, could have been solved, their infrastructural problems removed and the 15 million children who die worldwide every year, because their parents cannot afford to buy them nourishment, need not have died.

Truly, what it has cost to create this greatest of fighting forces is staggering beyond the imagination, and its capacity for killing and maiming human beings and its power to destroy wealth is so great that it beggars the sick minds of its creators.

What was it all about? Was it about the fact that millions of people in our world are dying from lack of food? That even more millions have their lives made utterly miserable by poverty? No, no! of course not! Wouldn’t it be silly to cause such upset over trivialities like the suffering of ordinary mortals?

Unnecessary poverty may afflict the greater part of the world’s population; millions may die of hunger and more millions may be homeless. Millions of children may go blind every year because the few pence needed for the treatment of each is not available and because those who own the world’s wealth are under an inexorable compulsion to use it for further capital accumulation. But these are not the sort of things that moves the United Nations or causes world mobilisation.

Rambo image

The UN was stirred by the fact that a tyrannical regime in Iraq, a state created by the oldest of the imperial powers, Britain and France, and nurtured politically and militarily by all the so-called “Great Powers", had over-run another tyrannical slate, similarly created on its borders. George Bush, the Texan oilman, whose oil interests temporarily reside with his son while he acts for his class as President of the USA, along with Baker, his colleague in politics and business, were both outraged. Economically, America was alarmed by the threat to their Middle East oil supplies and, politically, there were those in the Bush administration, including Bush himself, who saw the opportunity of beating the Iraqi dictator as a means of restoring the Rambo image which is the cultural fare in much of the United States and which had been shattered by the killing proficiency and endurance of the ill-equipped Viet Cong in Vietnam.

Since state capitalism in eastern Europe broke down under the weight of an inefficient, parasitical bureaucracy and a monumentally expensive military machine, those innocents who think wars are caused by conflicts between good and evil were hopeful that a new era of peace was dawning. Ironically, it was the threat of peace, or more specifically the lack of a threat from the Soviet Union, that allowed Bush and his war-mongering cohorts to railroad the UN into taking a stand against the Iraqi ruling class. Had the Cold War still been in operation Bush might have blustered but there would have been no Operation Desert Storm. Equally, had the US not marshalled support for action against Iraq, no other nation would, or could, have initiated the slaughter which has just ended in the Gulf.

Hi—jacked

Effectively, America, followed obediently by Britain, hi-jacked the United Nations. Like pouring petrol on a fire, they enhanced the prospects for the next round of Middle East conflict by using massive bribes of sophisticated military weaponry to Arab states, such as the dictator Assad’s Syria and Egypt, and, of course, the ruthlessly belligerent Zionist state of Israel. With Russia neutralized and the countries of western Europe anxious not to accentuate differences on the run-up to negotiations for greater Common Market political unity, the UN Security Council was in the political pocket of the US.

Wise and sincere people have put great store by the UN. Unfortunately for their theories, it was taken hostage by bribery and corruption and had its proclaimed role of a peace-keeping body reversed into that of one of the most ruthless destructive machines the world has ever known.

After more than a month of bombing and killing, the lying thug Saddam Hussein indicated that he was prepared to accept a Russian peace proposal that urged him to comply with the principal UN Resolution demanding the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Bush broke off entertaining his rich friends at his week-end retreat to give a demonstration of viciousness on television: as self-appointed commander of the UN forces, he decreed that there would be no let-up. and his military commanders responded by a frenetic upgrading of bombing raids on Baghdad and Basra.

Within forty-eight hours even the ruthless Saddam Hussein was forced to admit defeat. Up to this time the number of Iraqi casualties was unknown: what is known is that as the Iraqis retreated in disorder out of Kuwait and across southern Iraq, throwing away their arms and seizing any form of transport they could get their hands on. The American commanders of the world's "peace-keeping" force released the most brutal and unnecessary attacks that accounted for the slaughter of thousands of fleeing Iraqis.

The cost

The cost of the slaughter, seen predictably in financial accounting terms, is provisionally put at up to $100 billion plus a roughly equivalent amount for the destruction in Kuwait and unknown billions for the massive destruction of the industrial and commercial infrastructure of Iraq. Additionally, there is the $20 billion's worth of arms that it is admitted America, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait used to bribe Middle Eastern Arab states into supporting their cause in the UN and in the killing itself.

In defeating Iraq the Anglo-American military caucus lost some 50 personnel from all causes, mostly accidents. Current estimates of Iraqi casualties are provisionally estimated at between 75,000 and 85,000. Peace-keeping, it seems, is not economical with human lives.

Such fantastic wealth; such vile slaughter of human beings; such utterly appalling destruction! Such a compelling argument in favour of abolishing an obscene social organisation that, in the words of one of its most disgusting upholders, George Bush, "requires each generation to pay a price for freedom”.

Richard Montague

New World Order Comes to Iraq (1992)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Cold war ended, the USA found itself deprived of its anti-Communist card and could no longer use the “Soviet threat” as the pretext by which to intervene in defence of its interests in international affairs from Vietnam to Grenada.

The 1990 Gulf Crisis came just in time to arm President Bush with the excuse he needed to re-assert US international leadership at a time when its right to lead was being challenged, and when it was a third-place economic power behind Germany and Japan.

A US-led Gulf War would have many incentives for an economically-struggling superpower. As the Middle East was a major oil-producing region, it was important for the US to be seen as the champion of “liberty and democracy” here—at the end of the day there would be lucrative pay-offs, and it did not matter that both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had abysmal human rights records. Iraq could also be used as something of a showroom for every type of hi-tech weaponry available. Thus it was little wonder that US firms secured Middle East arms sales worth $18 billion months after the shooting war ended, not to mention a further $9 billion contract to supply Saudi Arabia with 72 F-15s in early September this year.

Two years after the “Mother of all Atrocities”, the Allies are back in the Gulf, like the proverbial villains returning to the scene of the crime.

Mandate to kick ass

This time the pretext is that Iraq has breached UN Security Council resolutions 687 and 688, in which Iraq conceded to allow UN inspectors, charged with rooting out and destroying its weapons of mass destruction, access to key ministries, and to halt the repression of its civilians.

The US, in reality, never needed the breach of any resolution to intimidate any country. The US has UN cover to kick ass wherever it pleases. This was made clear by the UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering who pointed out to the Security Council in 1990 how Article 51 allows the US “to use armed force . . . to defend our interests”. In this case to prevent Panama from using its territory as a base for smuggling narcotics into the USA.

That a breach of UN resolution 687 is the reason the US is back in the Gulf is something of an irony. After all, it was the US who gave Saddam the money to buy the weapons at his disposal during their years of diplomatic courtship, and few would doubt that the US intelligence network knew where the money went.

Bush’s love-hate relationship with Saddam stretches back some ten years, for it was then that Bush, as a big voice on the National Security Council, argued that Saddam wasn’t all that bad, that Iraq should be encouraged as a block to the Islamic fundamentalists of Iran.

By 1984 Bush’s relationship with Saddam had developed and Iraq and the US were enjoying healthy diplomatic relations and intelligence sharing – even at late as 1990 the CIA was tipping off Saddam about a Ba’athist assassination plot. In 1984, Bush also talked the Export-Import Bank into pressing on with a dodgy loan worth $484 million to Iraq.

A further $5 billion Community Credit Corporation programme was underway in 1987, the same year Bush met the Iraqi Ambassador for talks about the easing of licences for hi-tech exports sought by Iraq, and the same year Iraq attacked the USS Stark killing 37 US servicemen.

In 1988, ignoring evidence from US officials that Iraq was subverting US credit programmes to purchase arms, and opposing congressional sanctions brought about by Saddam’s murder of 2,000 Kurds at Halabja, Bush pushed through further loans.

When FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in 1989, evidence was found of a $4 billion link to Saddam’s arms network. Bush’s own administration went on to prove Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Bush, however, insisted that healthy diplomatic relations came first. As late as 1990, Lawrence Eagleburger and James Baker had pulled off a further $1 billion deal with Iraq through other government agencies, and days before the allied invasion, April Glespie, the US Ambassador to Iraq was telling Saddam how the US had no interest in his “border disputes”. What followed is etched in history forever.

Democrat Charles Schumer was right when he commented that Saddam was “President Bush’s Frankenstein . . . a run- of-the-mill dictator the President fed with US dollars”. (Guardian, 22 May).

Iraq’s breach of resolution 688 – the repression of Southern Shi’ites – is hardly something Bush should be losing sleep over. Wasn’t it the US which backed Saddam in his war against the Shi’ites of Iran – the same Shi’ites who saw the USA as the “Great Satan”?

As David Hirst pointed out: “During the Iran/Iraq war, the US backed Saddam as an instrument to contain Khomeinism and the dire threat it seemed to pose the oil-rich monarchies of the Gulf.” (Guardian, 28 August)

Strategic interests

Following the Gulf War came the “Great Betrayal”. Bush urged the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ites in the south to rise against Saddam. Thinking they had US backing they did just that, only to hear Bush point out that he would not mobilize ground troops in their defence; neither would he commit US aircraft to repel Iraqi sorties against them. Bush’s reason? He feared that Iran would capitalize on the Shi’ite backlash and spread the fundamentalist revolution to southern Iraq. Thus the US pulled back, fearing a strengthened Iran, now Iraq was disabled, would mean a greater threat to US strategic interests in the region. 

Of course, Saddam is just as big a hypocrite as Bush. In his war against Iran, Saddam heaped praise on the Marsh Arabs—Shi’ites who fought alongside Iraqi troops. Now Saddam sees them as “inferior and un-Iraqi, monkey-faced people”.

In reality, the second round of the Gulf crisis was a blatant piece of Bush electioneering – the latest instalment being the recently – announced sale of 72 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. A deal that will secure 20,000 defence jobs and up Bush’s election chances in the key Mid-West state of Missouri.

Bush claimed that the jets were a reward for Saudi support during the Gulf War, believing the deal will not disturb the strategic balance in the region – if there ever was one – at the same time contradicting his own stated policy of scaling down arms proliferation in the Middle East.

Bush’s sidekicks, Baker and General Brent Scowcroft, welcomed with open arms a high level delegation of Iraqi opponents of Saddam at a meeting in late July. For the mixed team of Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites provided the Bush administration with just the pretext it needed to have another go at Saddam. A deal was quickly arranged whereby an air umbrella would be enforced north of the 36th Parallel bisecting Kurdistan, with a similar exclusion zone below the 32nd Parallel between Baghdad and Basra.

On 13 August Bush and Scowcroft hatched a further plan, whereby UN inspectors would attempt to gain access to key Iraqi ministries. The innocent UN inspectors, supposedly highly trained and acting on their own initiative, in fact depended heavily on US intelligence.

Three days later, Patrick Tyler of the New York Times, broke a story concerning the UN inspectorate’s demand for access to the Ministry of Military Industries.

One official told how the whole cat-and-mouse game “relates less to the importance of any documents that might be found in the targeted buildings than the conviction that the steps will provoke a confrontation that will serve as a pretext for military action and to help the President get re-elected”.

By mid-August the US was well prepared to bomb any ministry failing to open its doors, or to knock out of the sky any Iraqi plane that did not belong there – the US had 120 planes on stand-by in Saudi Arabia with more offshore. They had also brought along, for the sheer hell of it, the GBU-28, a bomb capable of penetrating 90 feet of soil and concrete.

The US, in recent years, has acquired something of a name for itself when it comes to bringing along more tools than are needed for the job. In 1991, the coalition had 2,000 combat aircraft in the Gulf, outnumbering Saddam’s 3-1. Allied ground forces in 1991 numbered 700,000–troops from 32 nations. Saddam, as was only recently revealed (but you can bet Bush knew all along), had 183,000 troops.

The Vietnam Syndrome had left deep psychological scars on the Pentagon. Bush wanted to hit Iraq hard and fast, ignoring arguments that sanctions should be left to work. Now, sanctions are indeed working. At present inflation of the Iraqi dinar stands at 4,000 percent. The war has left starvation and disease in its wake, with little prospect of international help. Hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans will carry the mental scars of the war for years to come. So who the hell needs another war? Iraq needs one like it needs the plague.

The present crisis is also wrapped up in that complex term “The New World Order”, about which much has been written in recent years. Back in January 1991, Noam Chomsky (Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics Massachusetts Institute of Technology) had this to say:

  The NWO is real enough . . . its basic features were coming into force 20 years ago with the emergence of a tri-polar world as economic power diffused within US domains. The US remains the world’s leading military power, but its economic security has declined. . . . With the collapse of Soviet tyranny, the US is more free than before to use force . . . In the NWO, the Third World domains must still be controlled by force (Guardian, 10 January 1991).

The Bush administration is well aware of this. In March this year, the US Defence Department drafted a policy to:

  ensure that no rival . . . is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union . . . the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive position to protect their legitimate interests (Guardian, 9 September).

Peregrine Worsthorne was certainly thinking along the lines of US capitalists in the wake of the Cold War when he wrote that the task is to “to help build and sustain a world order stable enough to allow the advanced economies of the world to function without constant interruption and threat from the Third World”. (Sunday Telegraph, 16 September 1990).

Is it not a further irony that the US needs just this kind of “interruption and threat” to re-assert itself, exploiting its monopoly in the security market to reap economic rewards. Were the US to slash its defence budget by 25 percent in the next five years, as recently pondered by the Pentagon, it would face the prospect of pulling out of many of its bases in Europe and the Far-East. This would, as Francis Fukuyama pointed out “in turn stimulate real pressure for regional rearmament” (Guardian, 9 September).

But who would those nations wishing to re-arm buy weapons from? You guessed it and the US would always have the pretext to invade any up-and-coming tyrant who had a few too many weapons.

We should expect wars to be still on the capitalist menu in coming years.

John Bissett

From Columbus to Clinton (1992)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

All awful things come to an end. This one ended on 3 November with the election of Bill Clinton as leader of what he called in one of his speeches "the greatest country in human history". After a year of endlessly repeated “Gahd Bless America" and pseudo-debates on network TV between toothpaste models posing as politicians, a minority of the US population decided to vote for Big Mac instead of Wimpy. Faced with the choice between capitalism or capitalism they opted for. . . . Capitalism.

The most remarkable thing about the Presidential contest was that neither side addressed the most pressing question of all: How is it that in the richest country in the world nearly a quarter of the workers are living below the government’s own poverty line? In cities like Detroit and New York and Houston vast numbers are homeless, long-term unemployed, without any health insurance and empty of hope. A quarter of all US families (and 70 percent of black US families) have only one parent, and one in three of them are existing beneath the poverty line. 40 percent of Hispanics and 45 percent of blacks in the US face official poverty.

In 1970 7.5 million American families lived below the government-defined "near-poverty level" (of $13,700 per year for a family of four or more, in 1992 values); twenty-two years later the number of families living below that level has doubled to 15 million, constituting 44 million workers. Again, in 1970 less than half of US families were bringing in two wages, whereas in 1992 there has been an 11 percent increase in the number of two-wage families (to 56 percent), but still the number facing officially-defined poverty has doubled. Furthermore, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages (i.e. the buying power of workers’ incomes) are falling, so that in real terms the average US wage in 1992 can buy 19 percent less than what it could in 1972. In short, the workers are getting poorer.

Rhetoric
Neither Bush nor Clinton were prepared to go beyond rhetoric in relation to the problem of poverty. Bush has a lousy record of neglect for those in need. Following Reagan, his Administration operated on the callous basis that the market would sort out those whose needs should be satisfied. Of course, the market responds to profit and not needs not backed up by purchasing power. Bush has presided over a nation where the public provision of health care has been slashed (in Detroit every single non-private hospital has been closed down and they have been transferring the psychiatric patients to prisons after the state of Michigan decided to cut all welfare expenditure); free education has been discredited (the 1980s saw such cuts in Californian public schooling that now only the most impoverished children are sent to what were once regarded as the best schools in the USA); whole inner city areas have become crime-dominated, drug-infested wastelands (for the first time in twentieth century US history a majority of Americans no longer live in cities) and the level of street violence and murder is rising unstoppably.

In the light of such a dire state of affairs the Republican rhetoric of sickening Christian moralising must have offended a lot of American workers. Clinton was afraid to make anything more than indifferent noises about "change" in relation to the poverty issue because he feared that any talk of helping the most disadvantaged workers would lose him the support of the less disadvantaged wage and salary slaves. Clinton’s campaign exhibited all the lack of commitment or willingness to offend the rich which would make him a prime candidate for leadership in the British Labour Party.

Clinton did not win; Bush fell asleep at the wheel and lost. Clinton’s reputation is based upon the ability to indulge in empty phrasemongering of the "gahd bless you all" variety and a semi-eloquent knack of saying nothing. For example, in an interview in the September issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Clinton spoke of the need for greater American prosperity, then stating "we are going to have to reconcile ourselves . . .  to having a higher percentage of people at lower wage levels". In short, American prosperity under Clinton will mean more workers earning less than they do now. The American workers can look forward to more of the same: falling wages, unnecessary poverty, accompanied by plenty of flag-waving and toothy smiles.

The real Columbus
Of course, 1992 was not only the year of “the greatest country in human history” deciding which hollow grin to be stuck with for the next four years; it is also the year of national celebration of the arrival of Columbus to America five hundred years ago.

Most Americans know less about the real Columbus than they know about Clinton’s shady love life. In Britain the 1492 industry hit rock bottom with the production of the relentlessly unhilarious Carry On Columbus. There has been an ongoing row in the London borough of Lambeth where the local council refused to allow the erection of a Columbus statue outside the Archbishop's Palace because it would be offensive to local black people.

The memory of Columbus should cause offence. The European “discovery" of America as a land fit to exploit was accompanied by one of the most vicious exercises in human annihilation in the history of property society. When Columbus was governor of Espanoia, the first Spanish colony in America, 50,000 natives were killed within the first six months. They were not killed by accident or even neglect, but as a result of a calculated policy of destroying or enslaving the native Indian population whose lives prior to “discovery” had been characterised by communistic sharing and mutual aid.

Central Mexico, with a population of 25 million, ten times that of England at the time of its “discovery”, was reduced to a population of little over a million by the end of the sixteenth century. In western Nicaragua 99 percent of the native population was exterminated: from a population of 1 million to 10,000 in just sixty years. Peru and Chile had a population diminution from over 9 million to less than half a million due to the genocide.

According to Professor David E. Stannard's highly informative book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992):

  All told, it is likely that between 60 and 80 million people from the Indies to the Amazon had perished as a result of the European invasion even before the dawning of the seventeenth century.

That workers are being asked to celebrate this vast global plunder is evidence of the sickness of capitalist national ideology. While Bush piously tells Serbians to refrain from barbarous nationalist deeds, he and his friends, including Clinton, urge us to commemorate the barbarity of Columbus and the murderous robbers who appropriated America as their own.

The truth is that we have more to learn from and to respect about the native Americans who were killed off (only half a million survive in the modern USA, many still confined to squalid reservations) than from their persecutors. The truth is that a clear line runs from Columbus through to Clinton: the line of ultimate deference to the rights of property, and Gahd bless all those who own it. Socialists want neither their imaginary gods, their lousy flags, their oppressive governments nor their arrogant nationalism. We want a world without nations, states, classes or the curse of poverty. In the struggle to achieve that Clinton is our enemy; he is the enemy of anyone unwilling to succumb to the history tyranny of property.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Whose Choice? (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the December 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whose Choice?
Were it not for a few armed men taking some accurate shots at British troops in North America in 1776, there would have been no USA and no election for the American media to drone on about for the past year. It is interesting to speculate whether George Washington, were he alive today, would be banned from the media because he was a terrorist. However, Washington won and the battle between the two mega-mediocrities for access to the White House tennis courts has been in full swing. If you ask most workers who it is that chooses the President, they will tell you the electors do. Apart from the fact that about half of the American workers did not vote at all, it is a mistake to imagine that those who did made their own choice. Managing TV election campaigns, including millions of dollars of advertising time, is now one of the principle ingredients of any American Presidential election. Most political advertising conveys images of rivals rather than a candidate's policies, and the election is won on the basis of which millionaire most successfully destroys the credibility of the other. Thus it was that Dukakis lost, a victim of his own inability to show that Bush was a less competent and nastier individual than himself. Bush proved himself to be "the evil of two lessers" and so won the key to the door. Technically the key was handed to him by the workers of America. To be sure, if they wanted to they could use their votes to lock the door of the state to all future Bushes and Dukakises and other front men for the profit system. In reality, ABC, NBC and CBS had far more to do with the outcome of the 1988 Presidential election than the workers ever did. The TV screen did not reflect what the workers were thinking; it told them what to think We had good reason to make the same observation about the British general election last year. And as long as this is the case — as long as a small, unelected clique of politically conservative media controllers are allowed to set the electoral agenda — it is a matter of serious doubt whether the democratic claims of the electoral system can be treated as much more than a sham.


Whose Freedom?
The government has issued a new White Paper (7 November) on the future of broadcasting. They claim to be concerned to make the media freer. More channels, less regulation. greater local service — and of course, that favourite characteristic of capitalist freedom: if you want the extra goodies on offer you'll have to "pay as you watch". The claim of Mr Hurd and his fellow advocates of greater TV freedom is that more TV, with more market priorities governing it, will offer more opportunities for us to see what we want. This is not so. Firstly, the new channels will not open up new opportunities for independent TV production, but will be bought by current media monopolists, such as Rupert Murdoch, who is already making millions out of deregulated TV in Australia. These millionaires will not make exciting new programmes but provide the cheap, shoddy, and vulgar in order to please advertisers. Secondly, new TV stations will continue to cover the capitalist agenda. This is because the only people with a real incentive to produce TV which challenges the capitalists' interests are the working class and. as socialists never cease pointing out. the workers do not own or control the means of production. including means of mass communication. Greater media freedom will come about, not by flogging airwaves to multi-millionaires or by "relaxing" standards so that workers are able to watch dirty movies, but when the media is freed from the necessity of being a business.

Steve Coleman

Observations: Wimps or shrimps (1988)

The Observations Column from the December 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Washington DC there are now more than 5,000 jobs on offer. They include the Cabinet, executive officers, top people at the various agencies; ambassadors and judgeships. US attorneys and federal marshalls. Less prominent, but escaping Congress vetting, there are executive officers and 1,404 other government jobs, senior executive service members and 1,646 other grades.

However, you need not apply; you don't have the right qualifications even if you could muster the fare. In this instance qualifications do not mean academic achievement or previous experience but either the amount the applicants — or their parents — contributed to the newly elected President's campaign coffers or other favours done to help the new incumbent of the White House. You could say that at least in the United States, unlike in many even more obviously corrupt regimes.

But the election of a new President has wider repercussions in the US capital. The social scene changes; the Hollywood-style entertainment given by the ex-B actor and outgoing President is not that of either Bush or Dukakis. The impact of the new President will be felt by the whole Washington social scene as "society" apes the habits, likes and dislikes affected by him and his First Lady. Quoting Aram Bakshian. one of Reagan's — and recently Bush's — speechwriters, the Sunday Mirror of 17 October tells us that with Dukakis a "pseudo-prole" fashion of sweaters. ethnic clothes and leather patches will replace present glitzy fashions, whereas under Bush Country Club and “class and old money" will be the thing. Top restaurants will win or lose as Presidential preference will be faithfully aped. Under Bush sophisticated bistros will prosper; Dukakis' image would have brought prosperity to "homely" restaurants (with very unhomely prices!).

Ironically one of the jibes made against socialist society is that there would be a sameness about everyone. Yet here we have — more obviously projected than elsewhere — the cream of society in God's Own Country preparing slavishly to imitate the habits, clothes and manners of their President.

Eva Goodman

Intervention USA (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

In these days of the enterprise culture, government involvement in industry, commerce, banking and other economic activities is not the flavour of the month. Market forces are in and intervention, or so we are told, is out.

Indeed it would appear that this is true, for all over the world, in Britain, France, Australia and elsewhere, governments have been getting rid of much of what is called “the public sector”. In fact nationalisation, the main form of government involvement in a nation’s economic activity and once seen as a device which would solve all of capitalism’s economic and social problems, is more or less a dead duck.

So obvious is this even to politicians of “the left” that the Labour Party here doesn’t intend to re-nationalise all the Tory sell-offs of the last decade, while in the so-called communist countries private enterprise is being encouraged to compete with ailing state enterprise.

From deregulation…

However, even in such times as these, governments still have to step in and intervene when they think that the interest of the national capitalist class is in danger. For example, in the United States, the very heartland of non-intervention, there has been the growing problem of the Savings and Loans banks. These S and Ls are the rough equivalent of Britain’s building societies and hundreds of them have gone bust while hundreds more are insolvent. Their losses were $6.8 billion in 1987 and $3.8 billion in the first quarter of 1988, although depositors are covered by a government insurance agency.

How did this happen? Just as nationalisation was once seen as the great cure-all, nowadays it is “deregulation” which fills the bill. This means that enterprises in an industry no longer have to conform to laid-down government regulations but are freer to operate as they see fit. This, it is claimed, will produce a capitalism without its attendant problems, will provide greater all-round prosperity, and so on.

Thus the S and Ls were allowed by the Carter administration in 1980 to borrow, not only from small investors for re-lending as mortgages as previously, but from the money markets at ever higher rates of interest. This laid them wide open to trouble, which duly arrived when the Reagan administration further deregulated by allowing the now exposed S and Ls to move into high-risk lending for big property deals and other get-rich-quick schemes of which they had no experience. The result was the spate of bankruptcies and insolvencies already mentioned.

… to regulation

At present the insolvent S and Ls keep afloat by continuing to borrow at high interest rates and their debts are estimated to be increasing by $35 million a day. Sooner or later the government will have to foot the ever-mounting bill. The implications of this are serious for American capitalism. How can it ever tackle its massive budget deficit of $150 billion while it throws away billions at this rate? More seriously, many American banks have collapsed in recent years (almost 200 in 1987 alone) and the additional collapse of hundreds more S and Ls could trigger a disastrous loss of public confidence in the entire American banking system. The Administration have therefore intervened to try to stop the rot.

Bush and his financial advisers have come up with a plan calling for a one hundred billion dollar issue of new bonds to bail out the S and Ls. The interest on the bonds is to be paid to the government by the S and Ls and the other banks though higher premiums for Federal insurance of all bank deposits. Critics of the plan say it breaks Bush’s election promise of “no new taxes” as “the taxpayer”, in the form of the banks’ customers, will have the extra premium passed onto them through higher bank charges. But this will not necessarily happen because the customers may refuse to pay up, in which case the banks and S and Ls will have to bear the extra cost themselves.

This rescue package also calls for a leaner and fitter S and L industry to be taken over and run by another government agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and amounts to back-door nationalisation. So whatever their ideological preferences any government will make use of intervention, even despised nationalisation, when it suits “the national interest”.

All of this reinforces the Socialist Party’s view that whether government use less intervention or more, they are helpless in avoiding capitalism’s pitfalls.

Vic Vanni

Sting in the Tail: Getting Thatcher Out (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Getting Thatcher Out

Are Tony Cliff and the rest of the Socialist Workers Party dishonest or just barmy?

At an SWP meeting in Glasgow in December Cliff implored the audience to help "get Thatcher out".

When we asked if this meant that the SWP would, as it always does, urge workers to vote Labour at the next election, Cliff replied "We must always take sides in any struggle and if Labour Is even one per cent better than the Tories then we must support them".

Yet the SWP paper, Socialist Worker, on sale at that meeting stated:

We can recall again and again the record of past Labour governments which . . .  turned viciously on working people as soon as they gained office. 

and forewarned that 

. . .  it is perfectly possible that, regardless of intentions, a Klnnock government will be even worse In terms of its objective attacks on the working class than the Thatcher regime has been.

Any party which tells workers that and still asks them to vote Labour has to be dishonest AND barmy!

Getting Thatcher In

Mention of getting Thatcher out, do leftists ever ask themselves how she "got in" In the first place?

Back in 1974 their cry was "Heath out" and they got their wish when a Labour government was elected. But Labour inevitably got up the noses of so many workers that by the next election they would have voted for anyone, let alone Thatcher, to get Labour out.

So Thatcher's victory in 1979 was the product of the previous Labour government. Any future Labour government would be just as helpless in solving capitalism's problems and the Tories would claim that there really is no alternative to their policies and probably be given a mandate for even harsher policies than before.

The moral is; Electing a Labour government only gets you the Tories next time around.

Class Struggle in USA

They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there,You either are a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.

These words are from a union song written in 1931 about the bloody struggle between the United Mineworkers of America and the Appalachian coal owners.

This struggle has continued until today when the Pittson coal company in Virginia has set out to break the union. 1,700 miners have been on strike for seven months because:

Pittson has rejected the union contract and cut-off health benefits to 1,500 widows, disabled miners and pensioners.

(Billy Bragg writing in the Weekend Guardian 30 December)

The song also contains the line "And I'll stick with the union till every battle's won". A noble sentiment indeed, but workers' battles with capital can never be finally won by trade union action. Only their political action to end capitalism and establish socialism can do that.

Value for Money

The Times of 12 December brought the exciting news of two increases in income:

Britain's 55,000 pre-1973 war widows and their supporters have won the battle for a better pension . . . The rise will mean that all war widows will receive a pension of more than £100 per week.

The war widows' increase is the result of a 16 year battle by The Campaign for Equal Pay for War Widows organisation, who described the increase as "an enormous improvement and we are very grateful".

Mr. Michael Mates, chairman of the all-party select committee on defence called it "a quick, fair and generous response.

16 years is apparently Mr. Mates' idea of "quick". One wonders how many widows have died in these 16 years.

As for "generous" we wonder how he would describe the other increase reported in that day's Times.

Lord Hanson's pay topped £1.5 million In the year to end September according to Hanson's annual report.

It would seem that giving your life "for Queen and country" is valued rather less than staying alive as a company director.

Wounded Minds

When George Bush visited American soldiers wounded during the invasion of Panama, one man, paralysed by his wounds, handed him a small American flag and told him:

I want you to have this from them, and thank you for sending us.

Guardian 2 January

Presumably "them" were the 23 American soldiers killed and the 323 wounded during the fighting, but needless to say it was Panama's workers who suffered most. Their dead are expected to exceed 1,000 and many still lie beneath the ruins of the barrios (slums) which were flattened by indiscriminate American firepower.

But what if that paralysed soldier had been an Iranian and Bush the Ayatollah? The exchange between them would doubtless have been presented by the media as an awful example of Islamic fundamentalism. Bush and the class he represents should be pleased by the Yankee-Doodle fundamentalism produced by America’s head-fixing industry.

Blind Leaders

"What's that, my boy, you hate being a wage slave? Well forget socialism, that's utopian nonsense. Consider instead Mrs. Thatcher's vision of the future - 'Every man and woman a capitalist', so show some enterprise and start a business!

Pay no attention to the fact that there were 16,562 business failures in England and Wales alone in 1988. Trade Indemnity, insurers against bankruptcy, estimate there will be 20% more in 1989 with a further increase in 1990.

The reasons? Well, there’s high interest rates, but this would be to your advantage if you started a bank.

Then business confidence is low, but isn't that precisely when capitalists like to take risks? And there's increased competition from Europe, but we British can always see off these foreigners, eh?

So, my boy, I expect you can't wait to get started on the road to fame and fortune. What's that you say? You've never heard a bigger load of utopian nonsense in your puff and you'd rather stick with socialism!

There’s no helping some people."

Genocide in Brazil

The Yanomami Indians live in the remote forest area on the frontier between Brazil and Venezuela. As their home is stripped for cattle ranches their way of life is fast disappearing.

The process has been accelerated by the discovery of gold in the region. It is estimated that there are only 20,000 of them left. Their future looks bleak as the Brazilian government, instead of honouring its promise to send in troops to clear out the 45,000 gold miners who have invaded the area, have announced that 256 square km. of the area will be set aside for mining inside the 2,000 square km Yanomami reservation. This was formerly 9,000 square km.

Every time a more primitive people come in contact with capitalism the result is disastrous for the tribal society. The murder of the Indians of North America in the 19th. century is being repeated in the Amazon in the 20th. century.

Inside capitalism the profit motive is all-powerful. As a whole culture disappears, supporters of market forces can reflect on the "improvement" of pulling down the forests and poisoning the rivers with the mercury the miners use to purify the gold.

Scorpion.