Running Commentary: Miracle or Myth (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Miracle or Myth

When all is said and done, the reason British workers are encouraged into awestruck admiration towards Japan is because it is where the workforce are supposed to submit happily to their own intensely organised, single minded exploitation. Japanese workers. we are told, don't come out on strike; they wouldn't know a demarcation dispute if one came up and punched the clock beside them in the morning; Japanese managers wear the same work clothes, eat in the same canteen, do the same physical jerks, as the workers on the assembly lines. A Japanese company doesn't just employ its workers, it operates like a second family to them, taking care of them all their lives.

This, to take the argument further, is what has made Japan the second richest country in the world. Considering their defeat in the last war. it's nothing short of an economic miracle. Why don't British workers follow the example — kick out the trouble-making union leaders and learn to love working hard for the shareholders?

Well one reason is. perhaps, the evidence that Japan is not a land of unrelieved contentment. For example the suicide rate there has been rising dramatically during recent years. The figure for 1986 was the highest ever and averaged at one suicide every 20 minutes; 55 per cent were by people aged between 40 and 64. The reason, according to the National Police Agency, is ". . . the stresses of Japan's competitive society".

In 1985 the Japanese Ministry of Labour found that almost half the absences of more than one week due to sickness were caused by some stress related illness. One in 30 office employees needed treatment for mental disorder such as schizophrenia, depression or alcoholism.

It is no coincidence that these social ailments are appearing in such strength just as Japan s economy hits trouble in world markets. This has posed extra problems for managers and executives — the higher paid, higher stressed workers and many of them have taken their own lives rather than face the reality that, for millions of people, the Japanese economic miracle is a myth. It is not the Japanese workers who are the second richest in the world but the capitalist class there — the parasites who own the means of life.

Japan has been described by a psychiatrist as a country of ". . . 121 million people . . . ruthlessly competing with each other while desperately pretending to be co-operative". Does that sound like a place of secure happiness? Does it sound like a miracle of prosperity and mutual help? Or does it sound like the capitalist system which workers know and hate all over the world, all the time — but writ large for its distress and destructiveness.

Release

Douglas Hurd is the latest of the Home Secretaries who have declared their intention to bring an end to overcrowding in the prisons. Nearly twenty years ago the "liberal" Roy Jenkins warned that a prison population of 40,000 would be "intolerable"; the fact that recently it exceeded 50,000 and continues to hover around that level says something about the tolerant nature of Home Secretaries, not to mention the prisoners and prison staff. During his time at the Home Office Leon Brittan — who set something of a record by managing to upset the police, prison officers and prisoners pretty well all at once — promised to end the overspill of remand prisoners into police station cells. Yet until last month hundreds of prisoners were spending months crammed into those gloomy, insanitary conditions, at the end of which they may have been acquitted of the charges against them or given a non-custodial sentence.

Hurd's "solution" to the overcrowding has been to slash the sentences imposed on minor offenders so that anyone getting twelve months or less is released after half their sentence instead of after two thirds as before. As a result nearly 4000 prisoners were abruptly ejected from the gaols of Britain during August.

Leon Brittan did not approve: "a sad development for British justice" he called it. But what need was there for him — and for anyone who suffered nightmares at the prospect of hordes of dangerous thugs roaming the streets — are social inadequates, which means inadequate not only to keep up in capitalism's rat race but also inadequate in the crimes they commit in their efforts to keep up. For many of these the exact date of release matters little for within a fairly short time the seemingly inexorable cycle of destitution, crime and prison — perhaps speeded up by addiction or alcoholism -— will begin again. One authoritative estimate says that 80 per cent of short term prisoners emerge from gaol to face acute housing problems — which must make even Leon Brittan wonder why they should want to come out.

Hurd's reform is the latest in a long list which have failed to stop the rise of the prison population. There have been suspended sentences; community service; bail hostels and parole, to name only a few. In many cases there is little doubt that courts have adjusted their sentences upwards to compensate for such measures and the expectation is that this will happen to take account of Hurd's half remission.

No reform will affect, let alone solve, this problem. The roots of crime lie in the very system which needs a state machine with its police, judicial and penal organs, to protect the property right of the ruling class. No Home Secretary could ever have —- or want — a brief to do anything about that.

Success

Rudolf Hess' dramatic flight to Britain during the last war was at first met with a sort of stunned optimism. Did this mean that the Nazi leadership was breaking up. that in spite of the fact that Panzers had swept over half of the Continent Germany was on the verge of defeat? But this was soon followed by an official reticence; one theory about this is that the British government decided it was best to devalue the whole episode by labelling Hess as mad, placing him in the "care" of a squad of psychiatrists. At all events, the episode saved Hess from the death sentence at Nuremburg although what would have happened to him if the war had gone the other way. . .

The most popular theory about the reasons for Hess' flight is that he was trying to negotiate an Anglo/German alliance against Russia, which was about to be attacked by Germany. Of course such a proposal was bound to fail — at least at that time, when the British ruling class were in no doubt about the source of the principal threat to their standing and where their interests therefore lay.

It is a different situation today. Although he was not responsible for it, Hess may well have looked with an ironic satisfaction on the present unity between Britain and West Germany, directed as it is against Russia. Over the past forty-odd years the basic interests of capitalism have remained unchanged but their elements have been re-arranged, rather like a kaleidoscope, so that some countries which were once allies are now enemies and vice versa. Capitalism's history is littered with such changes, notably in the case of relations between the British and the German ruling classes.

These changes bring obvious problems to the makers of national propaganda. The wartime alliance between Britain and Russia was represented by both sides as a unity in defence of democracy. Now the alliance between Britain and Germany, aimed against Russia, is justified with the same reason. The only way to make any sense of this is through grasping the fact that wars — including 1939/45 are not fought to save democracy. In the last war the nature of Nazi Germany enabled the British propaganda machine to persuade many workers to join the war effort under the delusion that they were fighting for some worthwhile, human objective and to conceal the truth — that the war was fought to protect the economic interests of their national class of exploiting parasites.

The essential cynicism and lies of capitalism are rarely revealed more clearly than in wartime. One thing about the flight of Rudolf Hess is that from beginning to end it was subject to this treatment. Even his death was a matter of international wrangling, of one ruling class trying for advantage over the others. As a one-time political leader himself, he could have asked for no more appropriate end.

"Bottoming Out"? (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the current slump coming to an end, “bottoming out” as Francis Pym puts it? It is in his opinion, as well as that of the Governor of the Bank of England and Leon Brittan, Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

They could be right because sooner or later the slump will come to an end. As Marx pointed out “permanent crises do not exist”. His study of the workings of capitalism led him to the conclusion that “the life of industry” is “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation” and to speak of “repeated self-perpetuating cycles, whose successive phases embrace years, and always culminate in a general crisis, which is the end of one cycle and the starting-point of another”.

The course of production under capitalism is cyclic: boom-slump-boom-slump-boom-slump. In the long-run the trend is upward but this is by no means a steady, continuous growth; it is a growth by fits and starts so that the graph of production is one of peaks and troughs with, generally (but not always), the last peak higher than the preceding one.

But we don’t have to go back to Marx for this. With the complete discrediting of Keynes in recent years, a little less misunderstanding of how capitalism works has crept back into the universities and even into government circles. Leon Brittan, for instance, told a meeting of the Teeside and District Chamber of Commerce and Industry on 24 April:

  My first answer to the question “How will the recovery come about?” is “naturally, just as day follows night”. The regularity of the business cycle in this and, I suspect, every economy may not be fully explicable, but its existence is undeniable. The Central Statistical Office have analysed it lucidly in their work on the “cyclical indicators”. They tell us that the normal cycle lasts a little over four years; that it begins with an expansionary phase of some 20 months, and ends with a slightly longer period of some 30 months of much slacker activity. Though the timing is not precise to the last month, the rhythm is well established. And, more important, though the extent of the expansion and slow-down differs, there has been no trade cycle since the first world war in which output has not grown significantly in the expansionary phase. So phases of growth are truly a central feature of the natural rhythms of our economy. One would need the most compelling evidence imaginable before believing that we had suddenly departed from that pattern of behaviour.

It is equally true of course that phases of slump are “a central feature of the natural rhythms of our economy”, but Brittan at least recognises that there is a business cycle and that it is “normal” under capitalism. And he is right that a recovery must follow a recession, as night follows day, even if he could be wrong about the timing. For while it is true that sooner or later the present slump will come to an end. there is no way of telling whether this will happen sooner or later. Brittan, as a politician, naturally hopes that it will be sooner. In the case of the Governor of the Bank of England (where Keynesian illusions are still fairly well entrenched), it is probably more an attempt to influence the psychology of businessmen by giving them the impression that things are getting better in the hope that this will get them to begin reinvesting. In other words, trying to talk them out of the crisis in accordance with one of the crack-pot ideas thought up by economists.

Doing Nothing

One of the implications of the view that capitalist production goes through a series of “repeated, self-perpetuating cycles” is that government intervention can do little to influence this—except, as Marx pointed out, to provoke a crisis prematurely, but certainly not to bring about a recovery before it would normally occur anyway. Doing nothing is in fact just as effective, or rather ineffective, as applying the whole range of Keynesian gimmicks. The plain fact is that governments do not control the workings of capitalism and that capitalism will continue to go through the boom-slump-boom-slump cycle in its own time regardless of what they do.

The present Tory government seems to have accepted this fact of capitalist economic life. At any rate it is at the moment behaving as if it had, since, despite the howls from the die-hard Keynesians in the Labour Party and the TUC, it is in effect just sitting back waiting—hoping and praying too, no doubt—for the recession to bottom out naturally.

The reason a slump is sooner or later followed by a boom is that slump conditions themselves create the condition for a recovery: a restoration of profitability. It may seem paradoxical that, as at the moment, there should be increased company profits and rising share prices alongside industrial stagnation and massive unemployment, but this is what happens towards the end of a slump. At the beginning of the slump, just after the crisis, profits are hit but as the slump continues it creates the conditions for a restoration of profit levels.

First of all by leading to a “devaluation” of capital. In other words, to a fall in the value of the total capital on which the rate of profit is calculated, permitting, with the same amount of profit, an increase in the rate of profit. This devaluation of capital does not necessarily mean that it is physically destroyed (though this is an extreme form which occurs in all slumps, including the present one) but that the replacement value of the physical components of capital (machines, factories, stocks) falls. For instance, when a company goes bankrupt its assets are eventually sold, but well below the price at which they were bought. The company which buys these assets now has the same physical assets but, as they have a lesser value, will be able to register a higher rate of profit than the previous owner even if the amount of profit remains the same.

A similar process occurs within firms which don't actually go bankrupt. They are forced to write off part of the value of their assets, so restoring the rate of profit. This process—bankruptcies, closures, take-overs, mergers—has been going on for the last few years and, if the speculations on the Stock Exchange are anything to go by, the stage may have been reached where profit levels have been sufficiently restored for the recovery phase of the economic cycle to begin. Or it may just turn out to be a bump along the bottom.

A second reason why profit levels are sooner or later restored in a slump is that wages fall. The value added in the course of production is divided into profits and wages, so that a fall in wages automatically increases the share of profits. Wages—real wages that is, or what they can buy in relation to the prices of consumer goods—fall in a slump because all the closures and bankruptcies result in an increase in unemployment. An increased number of sellers of labour-power turns the labour market more in favour of employers. As always happens when supply exceeds demand prices tend to fall. The labour market is no exception: with increased unemployment wages, which are the price of the mental and physical energies a worker sells to an employer, tend to fall.

Actually, in this age of chronic inflation, the amount of pounds in the wage packet does not decrease (except through short-time working and less overtime but we are talking about basic wage rates here). What happens is that wages increase less than the prices of other goods. When, in a period of double-figure inflation, trade unions settle for single-figure wage increases—as they are at the moment being obliged by economic circumstances to do—this is, in terms of purchasing power, a wage decrease just as much as the decreases in money wages wages which trade unions were obliged to negotiate in the slump of the 1930s. Then there was no inflation so it was clear straightaway what was going on. The same thing has been happening in the current slump, but because of inflation it is not so obvious. But the economic effect of these wage decreases has been the same: to help restore the rate of profit, a fact which has not escaped the attention of Leon Brittan. He gave as one of the factors making for a recovery:

  The latest wage round is seeing much lower wage settlements and therefore substantial reductions in the growth of pay bills: and we are witnessing dramatic improvements in productivity. These changes should correct part of the loss of competitiveness in many industries, and strengthen profitability.

So when will the slump come to an end? This year, next year, sometime, never? Knowing how anarchical capitalism is we are not going to engage in crystal ball-gazing or sooth-saying like the professional economists and lay down an exact date for the recovery. The recovery stage of the capitalist economic cycle will be reached sooner or later, that is certain, but whether it will come in time for the run-up to the next General Flection in 1983 or 1984, as Madame Thatcher told the Scottish Tories at the end of May that it would, is a different matter altogether. Later could be as late as the end of the 1980s. Capitalism has seen prolonged slumps before.

Adam Buick

Editorial: Alright for some (1985)

Editorial from the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not the exclusive brain child of Home Secretary Leon Brittan to increase the deposit an electoral candidate must lodge against securing a defined proportion of the vote. The idea has been around for a long time, as inflation has reduced the significance of the £150 deposit as a deterrent against frivolous and eccentric candidates; its implementation would concentrate the contest into the hands of the few big parties with a chance of being elected. The predictable protests from the smaller parties, such as the Ecology Party, may have forced second thoughts on the government; such opposition has succeeded whenever the idea of putting up the deposit has been floated in recent years. Although of course Leon Brittan does pride himself on being an unusual Home Secretary . . .

The Ecology Party is not among those classified as frivolous; that is reserved for the likes of the Raving Loony Monster Party, or Screaming Lord Sutch (who seems to win more applause as a daft parliamentary candidate than he ever did as a singer) or Commander Bill Boakes with his mixture of traffic, public hygiene and race neurosis. The opposition to the increase argues that it will not prevent such devaluation of the elections; it will simply confine the frivolous candidates to those who can afford it.

The argument for the higher deposit rests on the assumption that Screaming Lord Sutch is playing games when he stands for parliament while parties like Labour and Conservative are giving the matter a proper gravity.

But this is to confuse minority opinion with frivolity. What of the bigger parties? How do we describe an organisation like the Conservative Party, which has a long history of presiding over intense human misery and deprivation yet still claims to stand for a Better Britain? Are we expected to take seriously a political party which tells us that mounting unemployment and ever harsher impoverishment for the working class is really prosperity? Should we laugh or cry when Tory speakers assure us that the terror and pain and murder of war is really the height of glory and human achievement? It is surely frivolous for the Conservatives, after their appalling record of repression of the mass of the people, to persist in asking for working class votes?

Then what of the Labour Party? They tell us now that unemployment is avoidable, that it exists in Britain today by Thatcher's own personal design and that they have the cure for it. Yet they know that during their last term of power the figures of people out of work doubled; they know also that they began the financial fumbling with state expenditure restrictions which they now castigate as the road to longer dole queues, as if spending cuts were the Tories' exclusive policy. Is not this toying with the truth frivolous? The Labour Party now makes great play with the Tories' warring relationship with the unions, implying that they have the secret of a better, more productive way of handling industrial disputes. In this they ignore the history of their own governments, going back to the 1920s and 1930s. during which they were constantly in conflict with the workers over their policy of lowering living standards for the useful, productive class in society while protecting the privileges of the parasitic minority. Are the Labour Party to be taken seriously, when they now ask for the votes of trade unionists on the appeal that they will give them a better deal?

In this sorry mess, it is easy for the Liberal/SDP Alliance to denounce the Tories and the Labour Party as the Old Gang, implying that a New Gang under Steel and Owen would not have the same problems. But the Alliance produces no policy which is basically new or different from those of the Old Gang; it simply rehashes what the other capitalist parties have to offer, relabels it and promotes it through different salespeople. Is not this a frivolous waste of time? The same can be said for organisations like the Ecology Party, who attempt to analyse some of the problems of capitalism but offer remedies for them which leave the basic cause untouched. No worker should regard appeals to vote for reformism under yet another name as anything other than a sour joke.

In contrast, the candidates which the Socialist Party of Great Britain puts forward at elections are in deadly earnest. Socialists aim at capturing the seats of power, to dispossess the capitalist class and transform the basis of society from one of class ownership of the means of life into one of communal ownership. Very few votes are registered for that proposition, against the name of a socialist candidate. We have never approached anywhere near saving our deposit, so Brittan's proposal may be cripplingly expensive to us. But the lack of support for the ideas of socialism is not a measure of their validity; what socialists have to say is desperately urgent.

We argue that capitalism is essentially a social system which cannot meet the needs of the people. It must repress us with wars, poverty. famine, disease, ignorance, frustration . . . The parties which ask for our votes on the grounds that they can eliminate these problems while keeping capitalism in existence are claiming to be able to do the impossible; they are the ones who must not be taken seriously.

Only a social revolution can get rid of the ailments which afflict human society today. That revolution cannot be masterminded by leaders; it must be carried through by a politically conscious, participating working class, worldwide. This is at present a minority viewpoint but it is anything but eccentric or frivolous. It is the very stuff of social progress to a free, co-operative, abundant world.

Running Commentary: The laws of nature? (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The laws of nature?

An established part of what is sometimes called the charm of an English summer is the series of social and sporting events at which the ruling class both disport themselves and demonstrate their privileged standing in capitalist society.

Summer is the time for top hats and elaborate dresses — and elaborate and nonsensical regulations about them — at Royal Ascot. It is the time when a few youths under elaborately hyphenated surnames play out, as if it were some epochal battle, the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lords. It is the time for royal garden parties, when practised toadies make their way, in rented clothes, to Buckingham Palace to consume a little food and to profess a huge delight should they so much as see, let alone touch or talk to, a royal personage.

These rituals, and the others, are often the subject of both admiration and gentle derision, as if they were no more than harmless eccentricities. We are all assumed to accept them without discomfort as if class divided society, in which a small minority wallow in boundless riches while the useful, working majority grapple endlessly with the pressures and degradations of poverty, exists and operates under some eternal law of nature.

Implied in this expectation is also a warning, for it is a perilous business to go against the laws of nature. Class society must, therefore, be allowed to go on its way unmolested by any talk of a revolution to put the majority into ownership of the world.

For the ruling class this is of course a very comfortable argument for this law of nature sanctions their enjoyment of innumerable costly meals and clothes, of opulent homes and expensive schools for their children. It grants them an enormous consumption of wealth in the production of which, as a class, they have no part. Those who do produce all the wealth — the other class — are also subject to the same law of nature, which allots to them the role of enduring poverty.

Except that it may be described as a stage in human history, there is nothing natural about capitalism. Neither is it eccentric and it is certainly not harmless. It is a malignant society, responsible for an enormous burden of human suffering, all of it unnecessary and which could be abolished in the immediate future. This is the reality behind the season, this annual opportunity for the capitalist class to flaunt their riches before the world and. in that way, to defy the working class to do anything about it.

Directions to Greenham

The embattled women of Greenham were recently visited by Pensioners for Peace, an organisation whose members think like this: “We have seen that two world wars and dozens of localised lesser wars solve nothing"; and "I have six grandchildren and I want a future life for them". Perhaps they were drawn by the popular assumption that the anti-nuclear movement stands for peace; it is common to see car stickers with the CND symbol, against a rainbow background, with the slogan "Give Peace A Chance".

But anyone who wants to give peace a chance should be thinking a long way beyond CND, which has the limited object of persuading the British government to abandon, on its own, its nuclear weapons. CND has no policy for the abandonment of what are called conventional arms, nor for the disbanding of the armed forces or any part of the coercive state machine; indeed it is safe to say that the majority of CND members support the continuance of the state. CND is not a pacifist organisation; its members do not declare that they will oppose all wars and refuse to take part in them on moral grounds. How could it make such a claim, when it is chock-full of members of political parties which always stand up for the interests of the British ruling class when there is a war?

CND does not attempt any analysis of the cause of modern war, which would enable it to pronounce a solution. It opposes the socialist argument that to end war we must undertake a social revolution to bring about a fundamental change in relationships in society. Instead, CND thinks the human race can continue to scratch its way through this social system, with its fear, its destruction, its deprivation. The best it can offer is an effort at humanising some aspects of capitalism—a pious hope that the system will act out of character and begin to fight its wars in a more gentlemanly way.

Pacifists, or anyone who in interested in setting up a world without war, should ponder these facts before they commit themselves to membership of CND. It is true that one of the world's most urgent needs at present is the abolition of nuclear weapons. But this will not be achieved by any methods which allow that capitalism will carry on—by methods which aim at reforming capitalism. These weapons grew up directly as a response to this social system’s needs and its priorities, which are immune to any appeal on the grounds of human interest. They are as typical of the system as buying and selling, rich and poor, privilege and deprivation. Only the abolition of capitalism will end war and all its weapons. Workers everywhere have a united interest on that score and there is an urgent need that they assert it.

Release into slavery

In the first days of July hundreds of prisoners were released before their time, many of them to exchange the rude security of prison life for the state of being homeless, jobless and aimless. Their abrupt transition into freedom resulted from Home Secretary Leon Brittan using his powers to widen the scope of releasing prisoners on parole by reducing the qualifying period for it.

There need be no concern that this came about through any softness on the part of Brittan, than whom a less sentimental man would be difficult to imagine. There are other reasons; importantly a long-standing concern at the chronic overcrowding in prisons, as the numbers behind bars have stayed obstinately above the level described by Roy Jenkins, when he was Home Secretary in the sixties, as “intolerable”.

At the same time the evidence has been piling up to show that, while prison has little effect on crime rates, it is also the most expensive way of dealing with the criminal. The sacred phrase “cost effectiveness” has been heard in the august, secretive chambers of the Home Office. Reforms have been tried — the suspended sentence, the deferred sentence, community service — but the prison population has remained high. This has brought the advocates of cost-effectiveness to their latest solution — to let the prisoners out early, a reform which will of course last as long as the courts don’t fill the prisons up again.

This may not be pleasing to those who regard anyone who has been in prison as a sort of wild animal, unsafe to walk the streets with innocent children and frail pensioners. Neither does it please those who are expected to work within the confines of cost effectiveness — the probation officers and social workers who now have the role of controlling the released prisoners — when all along they have kidded themselves that their job was. inviolably, to put people before the balance sheet.

All such delusions are unhelpful, because they evade the fact that a society based on property rights defines crime in such a way as to protect the privileges of the ruling class, which must always mean against the interests of the majority. In the name of the ruling class a massive historical offence is committed — the offence of exploitation, with all the misery and destruction which it legally entails. Of course this social system puts human welfare very low in its priorities; it could not function in any other way.

No one should be under any misapprehension; those prisoners, happy as they may be at their unexpected change of fortune, have not been released into freedom but into wage slavery.

Woman’s touch

At the end of the spasm of ballyhoo called the primary elections. Walter Mondale went to the Democratic convention with his party’s nomination apparently in his pocket. Of course there might have been some last minute hitch for him; there have been shock nominations in the past and conventions, ungentle occasions where arms are agonisingly twisted and political debts ruthlessly gathered in, are not always predictable.

As Mondale assumed he would be the Democrats’ man against Reagan in November he turned his attention to the matter of who should be his running mate, the Democrat candidate for Vice-President. This is always a complicated, tricky business, more a matter of tightrope walking than arm twisting which Mondale. with his background, should know more about than most people.

The usual object in selecting a running mate is to arrive at a balanced ticket — a pair of candidates who between them appeal to almost every accessible prejudice among the voters. That was why Kennedy, wealthy and sophisticated New England Irish with a reputation as a “liberal", swallowed his antipathy for Lyndon Johnson and asked the coarse, rich, folksy Texan to run with him in 1960. With what results we know.

But if the polls are correct, Mondale has an especially tough job ahead of him. which means that his tightrope walk had to be particularly slick and delicate. Apart from anything else he needs to expunge the workers memory of those ghastly years as Jimmy Carter’s Vice President, when capitalism in America and outside would do hardly anything right for them.

When Mondale let it be known that he was considering selecting a woman he got a plentiful press coverage with admiring profiles of the women concerned, implying that they were something special among the administrators of capitalism. It might be a smart move for the Democrats to put a woman into the field — a touch of excitement and evidence that they are liberal, tolerant and progressive to set against the image of Reagan’s ageing, conventional attitudes.

Any American worker who feels like puking at the sight of Nancy Reagan simpering adoringly at her Ron might have found the thought of the Democrats’ Geraldine Ferraro irresistibly attractive. It is quite common for workers to mistakenly believe that the personality of a candidate is significant.

Now that the Democrats have chosen Ferraro we shall probably hear a lot about the merits of having a woman trying to run capitalism — except that in the time of Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher there is no need to labour the point that this is no happier nor more fulfilling a society under female leadership than under males.

The selection of the candidates, like the campaign itself, is a matter of cynical deception, as the Democrats and the Republicans try to persuade the American working class that it is worth choosing between two slightly differing styles of running American capitalism. Mondale and Ferraro are intended to present as a seductively handsome couple but if there is any hope in the election it lies with those few who are aware enough to look beneath the facade to the cruel reality.

Madness or sanity

Are there still any fossilised members of the Communist Party who greeted, as a move to safeguard peace, the recent announcement by the Russian “Defence" Minister Ustinov that Russia has increased its missile carrying submarine fleet off the American coast and can now hit American targets within ten minutes?

Ustinov was responding to the siting of American cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe and he warned that any increase in these missiles will lead to a step up in their Russian counterparts. So if World War Three breaks out the missiles from each side will be passing each other on their way to 

their targets and within minutes a large part of the world will be devastated.

Any alarm at this prospect should be tempered by the realisation that this is the deterrent theory in practice — the theory which is supposed to have protected us from war since 1945 and. unless some meddling disarmers take over, will continue to keep us safe. The less gullible will realise that the deterrent theory is really another name for the arms race. And who can guess how this one will end — what unimaginably frightful weapons will yet be developed, what will be left of life if they are used?

The supporters of the deterrent theory respond that its whole point is that the weapons will not be used. If the theory is correct, there will be a lot of hardware left to rust in its siloes; a lot of intricate knowledge will have been devoted to something which will, in effect, be thrown away. And all of this will have happened through a concern, in Moscow and Washington and London, to protect human lives and happiness.

So far, however, capitalism has not worked like that and there is no reason to expect it to. The conflicts which are endemic to this social system are still in existence; the world remains divided into powers in rivalry over markets, material resources, trade routes. This rivalry is the immediate cause of modern war; to understand that is to understand why capitalism expends so much of its resources in the production of such devastating armaments.

In this horrific situation, the best that capitalism's protagonists can offer is a sham debate between the advocates of deterrence and disarmament in which both are in basic agreement that capitalism can somehow be run in the interests of its people. Both, in other words, deny the system's essential character.

The truth is that capitalism cannot operate without war. The function of any state is to foster the interests of its ruling class, which means that governments manufacture — and if need be use — the most destructive weapons available to them. We are now at a point where people all over the world accept, almost without question, the fact that a modern civilisation will produce things which can destroy it within a few minutes. It is tempting to call this madness. except that from capitalism’s viewpoint it has an awful sanity.

Lies, leaks and "authorised disclosures" (1986)

From the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Which is the most depressing spectacle - the pious penitence of Leon Brittan, forced to resign over a "genuine misunderstanding” about the correct way to leak a letter, the flamboyant exit from the cabinet of Michael Heseltine, the man who did the "honourable thing" because he couldn’t take the Prime Minister's autocratic manner any longer; the pathetic protestations of Margaret Thatcher that she didn’t know that any of these underhand events were going on; or the sanctimonious bleatings of the opposition?

Who do they think they're kidding? Anyone with an ounce of common sense realises that Leon Brittan resigned because he was caught in the act and his fellow Tories regarded him as a liability. He didn't resign voluntarily because of a breach of trust, but because he was forced to by his fellow Tories. Heseltine, the man who couldn't "remain with honour" in Thatcher's cabinet, took a bloody long time to make up his mind that he was such a principled politician. After all, it has not been only during the Westland business that the Prime Minister has run her cabinet like Attila the Hun; the sacked cabinet ministers who litter the Tory backbenches bear witness to the way she has usually dealt with dissidents. No, Heseltine probably thought he could get some political mileage out of his resignation, which might help in his bid to be the next Tory leader. And as for Thatcher s innocence - how stupid does she think we all are? Are we honestly to believe that members of her own office decide to leak a letter to discredit a member of the cabinet and then forget to tell her about it? Kinnock, Owen. Steel or any of the other politicians would never of course have engaged in such political machinations, would they? And, no, of course they're not really gloating at the possibility that they might, after all, be in with a chance at the next election.

The details of who said what, when and why, have been endlessly rehearsed and it seems unlikely, in the face of Cabinet minutes being tampered with, different versions of the same meeting being put about, and the government's reluctance to allow key civil servants to give evidence to the select committee, that the truth will ever be known. But what does it matter: the essentials of the Westland story are damning enough already.

So let's start at the beginning. A small company in Yeovil is unable to make sufficient profit from helicopter manufacture to continue its operations. Offers to buy into the company and prevent it from going to the wall are received from two rival groups of capitalists: Sikorsky-Fiat in the mainly American comer, and the European Consortium. Nothing unusual so far - all part of the normal process of big capital buying out little capital. The chairman of Westland, John Cuckney, and the board of directors prefer the American offer and decide to recommend it to the company's shareholders.

Meanwhile the two rival bids are championed in the Cabinet by Heseltine, the Defence Secretary who favours the European bid, and Brittan/Thatcher who favour the Americans. Heseltine tries to play the "national interest" card (usually a winner) - do we want to lose control of a vital part of our defence industry to the Americans? But he is trumped by Brittan/Thatcher who publicly play the non-partisan, market forces, leave-it-to-the shareholders card, while privately leaning very heavily on British Aerospace (part of the European consortium) to try to make them leave the field open for the Americans.

The motives behind this political partisanship are immaterial: maybe Heseltine does genuinely believe that the "national" interest will be best served if Westland is taken over by the European consortium. Maybe Thatcher and Brittan do have good reasons for wanting the American bid to succeed. Who knows; who cares? Squabbles between rival groups of capitalists trying to grab a bigger share of the cake go on all the time and given the close links between capital and politicians it's not surprising that their case should be taken up by rival groups in the cabinet, especially since Westland provides military hardware.

It's not surprising that politicians take sides in arguments between capitalists; what is unusual is that they should be seen to do so. Governments are not supposed to appear partisan. So the Thatcher/Brittan faction in the Cabinet tried to silence the renegade Heseltine by making him promise to abide by the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility, which means that he should agree with the rest of them, in public at least. At this point Heseltine discovered that he was a "man of principle" and walked out of the Cabinet.

Meanwhile selected bits of a letter from Patrick Mayhew. the Solicitor-General, to Heseltine. complaining of "material inaccuracies" (lies) in a letter he had written to Lloyds, advisors to the European consortium, were leaked to the press. Mayhew complained. The Prime Minister set up a leak enquiry which told her that there hadn't been a leak but an "authorised disclosure" - authorised in fact by Brittan in consultation with the Prime Minister's own staff at Downing Street. So the finger was pointing at Brittan, not because he had authorised the leaking of a letter - authorised leaks occur all the time - but because he had bungled the job and got caught. The Tory back-benches immediately closed ranks and left poor Leon out in the cold - none of them wanted to be tainted by his failure. Thatcher has lived to fight another day although her reputation looks a bit battered. She's obviously still got a lot to hide, which is why she's against letting the civil servants directly responsible for the leak appear before the Select Committee. Trying to explain the increased unemployment figures (which, we were assured. were on the way down) no doubt now appears an easier task than trying to explain her own part in this saga of political dirty tricks.

So what conclusions should we draw from this sordid political episode?

Firstly, it doesn't really matter to us, the workers, who runs Westland. Whether it's Sikorsky, the European Consortium or Colonel Gaddaffi (who managed to get a look in, too, at one point): they would all run it according to the laws of capitalism, namely that if there's money in it, make it; if there's not, then don't. Secondly, the politicians involved have been lying, distorting the facts, using the media to put across mis-information, all for their own political ends. Thirdly, despite their attempts to appear whiter- than-white, the opposition politicians have gloried in the apparent demise of Thatcher and Co. because it serves their political ends. Finally, even if Thatcher had not demonstrated the most amazing ineptitude in her handling of the whole business - even if cabinet government had worked as it is supposed to, even if the letter hadn't been leaked but released to the Press Association through the "usual channels", what difference would it have made?

For cabinet government, a pillar of our own so-called democratic system, is anything but democratic. Democracy, if it is to have any real meaning, if it is to be anything more than a propaganda buzz word for politicians, must, at the very least, include the following:

• equal opportunity for everyone to participate in decision-making;
• equal access by all participants in that decision-making process to the relevant information. facts and resources;
• review and scrutiny of decisions made, with those given responsibility being held accountable to the whole community.

What happens in Britain today? We elect "representatives" - MPs - from a limited choice of a few candidates whose parties can afford to sponsor them and who have a virtual monopoly of access to the media. They campaign on a broad platform of promises which they may or may not keep once elected. As MPs they vote on a legislative programme put forward by the party with the most seats in Parliament (although not necessarily the most votes in the country). They decide which way to vote, not on the basis of the wishes of the constituents who they claim to be representing, but in accordance with the wishes of their party as dictated by the party whips. If their party is the largest, and if they make a good impression on the leadership, then they are appointed by the Prime Minister to ministerial office and those with the top jobs form the Cabinet.

The theory behind cabinet government is that ministers collectively discuss issues, the Prime Minister takes their advice and eventually a policy is hammered out, or decisions are taken. Once arrived at, those decisions are publicly defended by the whole cabinet in a show of unanimity which disguises the fact that there were probably disagreements between them. However, not all decisions are taken by the Cabinet. In fact many of the most important of them are taken by the Prime Minister in consultation with a few chosen ministers, or in secret cabinet committees. So in many cases decisions are taken without even the full cabinet knowing about them, let alone "our" elected representatives. And the more important the decision is, the fewer people are likely to know about it. Senior civil servants are also important since they brief ministers, draw up agendas, minute meetings, listen to the views of important pressure groups and generally control the flow of information.

Decisions made by the government are, in theory, subject to scrutiny by the whole of Parliament through MPs' questions, the work of select committees and government inquiries. In practice the government is able to hide behind the Official Secrets act, "national security" and the fact that it will be at least thirty years before anyone will get access to government papers, which even then are weeded to remove items deemed to be injurious to the "national interest". MPs are often unable to question ministers effectively because they lack access to information on which to base their questions. How can you ask a minister why he or she made a particular decision if you don't even know a decision has been taken?

So, representatives sitting in Parliament, cabinet government (whether or not the Prime Minister listens to her ministers), and Parliamentary scrutiny, do not add up to democracy as socialists understand it. Government on behalf of the capitalist class means no representation of workers' interests and no control over the decision-making process.

It is significant that although unemployment is higher than ever before, although education, welfare and health provision are being cut and our limited civil "liberties" are being still further eroded, it was none of these factors which shook the government. No, it was a conflict between rival capitalists and members of the ruling class a conflict that has nothing whatsoever to do with workers' lives.

Janie Percy-Smith

Capitalism and aircraft (1986)

Cover cartoon by George Meddemmen.

From the February 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the history of capitalism comes to be written, there will be very little mention in it of Michael Heseltine or Leon Brittan. The dispute between these two ambitious politicians may be represented to us now as a momentous clash of the titans, vital to us all, and that may well be how they themselves like to think of it. Perhaps in the end one or the other will find himself in Number Ten. None of these things changes the fact that this whole affair is of no real concern to the vast majority of people - which is what the history of capitalism will be all about.

That is not to say, of course, that there are not a lot of people who are presently interested in the contest between these two. Spurred on by the assiduous efforts of the capitalist media, there can now be very few members of the working class who have not heard of them. Whatever difficulty they may have in following the serpentine proceedings of the Cabinet, the ministries and the civil service, has not prevented many workers taking sides. Some argue that Heseltine deserves support for his opposition to an American take-over bid for a British firm, for his exposure of some dirty tricks in the government and of Thatcher's overbearing style of leadership. Others may have sympathy for Brittan’s adoption of a lofty refusal (he has claimed) to use his position as a minister to influence the take-over and to insist that the matter be left to the Westland shareholders, who know best how to protect their dividends.

It is impossible to say how many rush-hour bus queues have been disrupted by violent arguments between workers who don't have shares in Westland, or in any other company, about how best to look after the dividends of those who do. This is not an entirely fanciful notion, for workers do persistently take sides in such matters, in which they have no interest. They do this every time they complain about cheap foreign imports competing "unfairly'' with "their" goods on the British market, or when they get worried about a fall in the exchange rate of the pound or when and this is probably the most tragic example of all - they join in militarily protecting the investments and other interests of their ruling class.

Those types of uninformed prejudice will have been warmed by Heseltine's stand against the American bid for Westland. British workers are inclined to be a touch paranoid about invading American capital. It is difficult to unravel the reason for this; after all, American capitalists are no different from any others, who all have the same function - to organise and apply the most intensive possible exploitation of the workers they employ. Perhaps it is not unconnected with that period of Labour government just after the war. when British working class poverty was abruptly renamed post-war austerity which was, we were told, partly caused by the economic, commercial and financial domination of American capitalism. But that particular propaganda was no more than a convenient, opportunistic explanation for that particular period of capitalism in crisis. There have been many such crises since then, each one with its one spurious explanation the gnomes of Zurich, inflation. Arab oil sheiks - to divert attention from the basic fact that crisis is endemic to capitalism and that the system can't operate efficiently or to the benefit of the majority.

At the time of that Labour government there was, of course, still a British aircraft industry with ambitions to outsell American products. For some years British aircraft were successful competitors (and some were disastrous flops the Britannia, the Princess flying boat) until the massive power and investment of the American industry made itself felt. The last significant clash was in the 1950s between the DeHaviland Comet and the Boeing 707. Patriotic British workers sneeringly contrasted the Comet's sleek lines with its rival's chunkiness and assumed that the aircraft's appearance would have some effect on its profitability. But, as time has shown, the American industry had in fact developed the most economic - which meant, for the airline owners, the most profitable - design and the matter was settled when the Comets began to break up in the air. with such calamitous results for the passengers as well as for the aircraft industry in this country.

There were other spasms of life after that, such as the shorter-haul Trident and the VC10 and desperate governmental intervention brought about mergers in an effort to build a more concentratedly competitive industry. None of this worked, against the remorseless power of the American companies. principally Boeing. In any world sense, the British aircraft industry no longer exists and what there is of it is a truncated, cobbled-up patchwork of mergers and joint design projects with foreign companies. Westland is the latest example of this; unable to live much longer through its own competitiveness, it had to merge or go down.

British workers may not enjoy this, bombarded as they are with persistent propaganda about the "national'' interest, the need to keep "our" exports outselling all others and so on. Those who are convinced that they have a stake in the enterprise which buys their labour power, who therefore feel a common loyalty with the owners of the enterprise which actually exploits them to produce surplus value, are prey to all manner of social delusions. But the story of the collapse of the British aircraft industry bears witness to the capitalist reality that wealth, whether it is food or clothes or helicopters, is produced with the motive of sale at a profit. If there is no prospect of that sale then the motive for production disappears; the factories shut down and workers are thrown out of employment. There is much woe in the land and much cursing of scapegoats like American investors or foreign currency speculators. All of which misses the point. Westland's problems have nothing to do with any lack of human need for helicopters which, although at present extensively used as weapons of war have many obvious values to human beings and will be used in these ways when we have a society operated on the basis of human interests. The problems reflect the limited capacity of the market, which is the overall scope for the profitable sale of the machines. It is the market which interests the shareholders; they have invested capital in Westland in order to realise profit, not to produce things which are useful to human beings. If profit comes more readily from making helicopters as killing machines, so much the better for the investors; at present the big market is the military one. which goes some way to explain the government's inevitable interest in any take-over plans.

Which brings us back to that odious pair Heseltine and Brittan. In representing their clash as of great moment to us all they have avoided all mention of the basic issues about why and how helicopters are made, about how this society operates, about the class division between the useful producers and the parasitic owners and about the role of politicians in keeping this whole sordid deception whirling round and round. No, they will not attract a lot of mention in the history of capitalism. That can be written only when we have a saner, more humane social system, which means when the world's people have seen through to the realities of capitalism and the cynical posturings of its leaders.

Ivan