The Magic of the Mad-House (1992)

Illustration by Peter Rigg.

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Thatcher years it was "the magic of the market” which served as the Tory mantra. Buy your own home—start your own business—purchase shares—the market rules, OK. But for millions who listened to the bogus magicians it was not to be OK. It was to be less like magic and more like a trick. Homes repossessed: businesses bankrupt; shares having to be sold to pay the debts. The magic of the market was transformed into the misery of uncontrollable, vicious economic forces which are eating away human lives and ridiculing past aspirations.

The lie about the market was not hard to see—if you were not blinded by the prophets of profit. The market was mythologised, turned into a cosy image of friendly producers happily exchanging their wares in the town square. The propaganda of the Eighties tried to make buying sound like some sort of passport to security. They spoke of a "property-owning democracy” and wage slaves were fooled into buying their wafer-thin slice of it. So-called yuppies took huge mortgages, now costing them more than the petty packages of luxury living areas which they had imagined meant success. Unemployed workers were encouraged to borrow in order to set up businesses, the debts of which now mean that for many of them suicide and the receipt of their life insurance pay-outs is the most rational economic option.

In 1992 few speak of the magic of the market. There are the rightwing nutters from the Adam Smith asylum and the Libertarian Alliance—“we demand a free market in drug pushing and a privatised police force”—but these days they have one foot in the Tory research departments and the other in a psychiatrists waiting room.

These days—the days of hopeless disillusion—a new deity has arrived on the scene: The Markets. Switch on the radio and the newsreader will foretell its next divine act. “The Markets are feeling uncertain this morning—The Markets want a cut in interest rates—The Markets are not very pleased with the result of the French referendum—The Markets want more cuts in welfare spending”. It is like a return to Greek drama where huge, invisible entities govern destiny. The day after Major devalued the pound, or, to use the current newspeak, Major allowed the pound to free fall on the Markets, a man on the BBC said that he was uncertain about the future of the British economy, but "it's all in the lap of the gods now—or rather the Markets” (verbatim quote).

So now we have it: who needs Archbishops and Popes when we have thirty year-old stock market analysts with degrees in economic gobbledegook to tell us our fortunes? The same night as the above comment the BBC TV newsreader declared, in exactly these words, that "Industry would like an interest rate cut of at least another one per cent”. Who is Industry? Is it a man. a beast, a gang, a private club? Who are the Markets when they’re at home?

Of one thing we can be sure: the Markets are not the boys and girls in white shirts and braces who run round the Stock Exchange screaming like they’re on drugs. And Industry is not the men and women who are actually involved in industrial production. The workings of capitalism are not about them. These are the makers and counters of profits.

The truth is that nobody controls the Markets. Nobody can. It is beyond the control even of the few who benefit from production for profit. But those for whose advantage all of this market madness is going on are not the wealth-producing majority. The function of the capitalist market is to sell commodities in order to provide rent, interest and profit for the small minority who monopolise the productive resources of society. It is in their interest that the majority must suffer.

Whingeing marketeers
The spectacle of Tory ministers whingeing in parliament about profit-seeking speculators disrupting the economy is truly funny. Capitalism is all about the freedom to seek profits at anybody’s expense. What do the Tories want the capitalists to do? Lose the chance of making a fast buck so that the government will look good? Just as absurd is the Labour Party's claim that given power they could tame the market. Why then have they never left office since 1924 without unemployment being higher than when they were elected? A Smith-Brown government would be just as much at the mercy of the market requirement to produce profits as all earlier ones.

Any government which finds itself in power when capitalism is going through one of its endemic crises, with the need to destroy productive forces in order to restore profits, will have no option but to ride the storm. What is particularly just about the cries of seasickness from the present victims of an exceptionally rough storm is that they were the people whose whole appeal rested upon the endless prosperity and stability which they claimed market forces generate. For many workers “market forces” are a code word for misery. The best response to the sadistic whims of the Market-gods is to send packing the market-loving messiahs and abolish the market by bringing the resources of society into common ownership and democratic control.

A marketless society is the only sane alternative to the mad-house which they call The Economy. Tinkering with it will be of no practical use; it would be like buying a new suit for Frankenstein’s monster and hoping that newly-clothed a monster he will no longer be. The urgent task before us is to unite to take society away from those whose sole intent is to sacrifice needs for profits. Then, once society is in the hands of all of us, we can begin having free and equal access to the available wealth of this abundant planet.

Steve Coleman

Against the market (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will uproot every vestige of the market economy. As socialists, we do not accept the need for some “invisible hand” beyond the control of human beings, to govern human affairs and give them coherence.

We deny emphatically that a complex modern society that can leave its footprints on the face of the moon as surely as it can detect the sex of an unborn baby, is only possible because individuals submit themselves to the discipline of the marketplace. We reject the ahistorical belief that human history, which only recently gave rise to one class that prostitutes itself to another for a wage or salary, has come to an end in the experience of contemporary capitalism.

In this battle of ideas what is being contested is what it means to be a human being.

Poverty and plenty
Capitalism is a system riven by contradiction. At the most basic level there is, in Marxist terminology, a contradiction between its “forces of production”, the technological potential that capitalism has built up. and its “relations of production” that work to limit or constrain the manifestation of this potential. Economic scarcity is artificially maintained for the sake of perpetuating an outdated social system.

To perpetuate a system which has “objectively” outlived its use it is imperative that it be subjectively entrenched. For it cannot continue without the acquiescence of the majority upon whom the burden of its shortcomings fall. It thus needs to account for these in ways that deflect criticism from itself.

Take poverty for example. As in the Victorian era, so today there is a tendency to see this as something which is, unwittingly or otherwise, self-inflicted. This personalisation of blame is the mirror image of the myth of the “self-made man"; in each case the explanation for an individual’s fate is held to lie within the individual concerned. By the same token, society congratulates the millionaire on his millions and washes its hands of the pauper’s poverty. The interconnection between them is lost, broken and mystified in this fragmented and individualistic world-view.

That the roots of poverty are fundamentally structural cannot be doubted. Consider the facts. Why, for example, does homelessness exist when, in Britain alone, literally hundreds of thousands of homes stand empty and large numbers of building workers cannot find work? Why is food allowed to be dumped and farmers paid not to produce when there are millions of people grossly underfed?

Clearly, something gets in the way of satisfying human needs that could be so easily met. That something is the overriding priority of the profit motive. The market economy does satisfy some human needs but only incidentally and on condition that they are backed up by purchasing power. Yet the very means whereby working people express their purchasing power—their wages and salaries—constitute costs that have constantly to be curtailed to ensure profitability in a competitive market.

Empty houses and unploughed fields represent only the visible tip of an iceberg of structural waste. Arguably, of much greater significance are those activities which, though integral to the operation of a capitalist economy, do not meaningfully contribute to the satisfaction of human needs.

Such activities, directly or indirectly, account for roughly half the total workforce in the formal sector today and absorb huge quantities of resources. They embrace a vast range of occupations—from ticket collectors to tax consultants, from pay clerks to pension-fund managers. They vividly illustrate the potential of production that is trapped under capitalism, a potential that can only truly be glimpsed from a perspective that is fundamentally anti-capitalist.

In a socialist society such activities would cease to have any purpose; they would simply stop. The labour and resources tied up in them will be redirected into socially useful production. With productive effort much more effectively targeted, far more could be produced to satisfy human needs even without a commensurate increase in total effort.

This growing burden of structural waste is the most potent manifestation of what is capitalism's major contradiction. But what is the practical significance of this contradiction for the process of changing society?

We should not put a too mechanistic construction on this process. For a growing contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production to translate into an intensification of class struggle would seem to imply something else must happen. Otherwise there is no reason to suppose that the contradiction could not grow indefinitely without having any discernible effect on social attitudes.

One possibility is that working people would need to undergo a marked deterioration in their living standards in order to adopt a more militant class conscious outlook. However, there is again no reason to suppose that the development of capitalism and the exacerbation of its inner contradiction will bring about absolute impoverishment. In fact. Marx foresaw the possibility of the development of capitalism being accompanied by an absolute rise in the living standards of the working class (albeit a relative fall by comparison with the wealth of the capitalists). Moreover, far from absolute impoverishment being a necessary precondition of class militancy, the opposite was more likely to be the case: his analysis of the “lumpenproletariat” in 19th century France suggests that it was precisely this most downtrodden and impoverished section of the working class which was most easily co-opted into the most reactionary of causes.

By and large the living standards of the working class have risen significantly since Marx's day. While we should not judge progress by the yardstick of what our grandparents lacked but, rather, according to what we are capable of realising today, it is clear that the absolute impoverishment of the working class in the developed world (and over the long term) has not happened. And barring some unforeseen ecological collapse of our life-support systems, precipitated by capitalism's rapacious short-sighted appetite for economic-growth, it is unlikely to happen.

We should not overstate the extent of this material success. We would do well to remind ourselves that even in the most developed parts of the developed world there are still millions of people in a chronic condition of wretched hunger. In the United States, some 9 percent of the population— 12 million children and 8 million adults— do not receive a sufficient nutrient intake for growth and good health (Scientific American, February 1987). Nevertheless 9 percent of the population do not constitute a majority and. indeed, according to most nutritionists a much larger percentage of the American population are overfed.

Turning to the underdeveloped world, however, we find a very different situation. Since the war, the income-gap between them and the developed world has steadily widened as has the distribution of wealth within many of these countries. In some of them—notably in sub-Saharan Africa—living standards have fallen as a consequence of the encroachment of market forces on the subsistence economy.

It is sometimes argued that the success of capitalism—and by implication, the continuing justification for it—may be judged by the fact that it is able to support a larger, and still growing, population than ever before. This, of course, glosses over the fact that a significant proportion of the food produced—in parts of Africa, up to 80 percent—does not enter the market economy at all. Without the safety net of the subsistence economy, famine on a catastrophic level would surely ensue. More to the point, is the fact that we have the technological knowledge and resources today to make hunger everywhere a scourge of the past; it is because it has failed to utilise this potential that capitalism stands indicted.

Paradoxically, the more capitalism erodes the absolute foundations of material poverty, the more “spiritually” impoverished and alienated do our lives become. Like the mythical snake doomed constantly to devour its own tail, we can never find satisfaction or peace. Urged on by the advertisers’ hype to consume without limit, we pursue what must forever elude us.

“We are”, observed Erich Fromm, “a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent—people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save” (To Have or to Be?, 1976). In the face of this organised meaninglessness of the marketplace we retreat into a protective shell. Rather than engage with the world we seek to escape it. As Robert Cooperstein perceptively points out. it is not that “commodities do not provide the illusion of real satisfaction so much as they satisfy the real need for illusion" (The Crisis of the Gross National Spectacle).

Life, in short, has become a kind of spectator sport. We move through it, each in his or her own little fragile bubble of existence, buffeted by forces too diffuse to comprehend and too powerful to overcome.

Yet, in the end, human beings cannot be reduced to so many electrons along an electric current. We are not mere units to be pushed around by a world market and pressed into hired labour at the whim of capital. We need to validate our own identity as social and human beings by meaningfully participating in the life of others. We need to express ourselves in ways that contribute to the common good, to be valued and wanted for what we can give to society in return for the benefits of being a member of it.

Capitalism is a system of wage slavery notwithstanding the spurious freedom of the wage contract. It cannot be otherwise where the means of production are monopolised by a small minority. It imposes upon us conditions that conflict with our deepest needs.

This theme is one that socialists need to address as the old images of cloth-capped poverty fade from the social landscape.The realisation that human beings do not live by bread alone compels us to expand our definition of basic needs to embrace also our emotional needs as an integral part of human existence.

Mary Midgley argues brilliantly in her stinging attack on the existentialists for whom “hell is other people":

  The notion that we “have a nature", far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it. If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it.

Even Marx

  though he officially dropped the notion of human nature and often attacked the term, relied on the idea as much as anybody else for his crucial notion of dehumanisation. (Beast and Man).

To attempt to incorporate a “moral dimension" into the cut-throat world of capitalist competition—as exemplified by such organisations as the Institute of Business Ethics—must remain a futile gesture. Capitalism cannot be humanised. The segregation of morals and money is as entrenched today as when the limited company was first legislated for, relieving investors of any liability beyond the sum they invested.

If human values are to prevail over money values this will surely come about in spite of capitalism and not because of it It will come about as a result of a growing and resolute movement working in opposition to capitalism. And it will find its ultimate expression in a new type of society that will not place morality on a public pedestal as an impractical yardstick by which to judge its transgressors but will integrate it into every aspect of social life. Society will come to be a seamless whole, an experience which our "primitive*’ forebears once lived through and a prospect which our modern technology, at last unfettered, will greatly enrich.

Robin Cox

Europe's new war plane (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every worker who isn't a total abstainer from the news media will have heard about the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA) by now. Do "we" need it? Can "we" afford it? Why do "the Germans" want to pull out? Should the rest go it alone? These are some of the questions being bandied about as the defence ministers of the partner countries pose for the cameras on their way in and out of meetings. Well, what about EFA?

The Gulf War should have killed off the notion that the demise of the Soviet Union has ended the prospect of war. even world war between rival power blocs. The last such rivalry was exceptional in the way it ended, although the minor clashes it spawned killed enough workers. The USA, temporarily the only superpower in the business as only a bloc of countries acting in unison can now challenge it, cannot at present be threatened by missiles capable of hitting New York, as might have been the case prior to 1989. Thus when Jane's Defence Weekly (21 March) quotes the RAF as having identified a need for a “stealthy long-range penetrator” (this is a type of bomber!), for use against "threats" further from home than was envisaged in Cold War days, the author accepts this without bothering to identify who these new enemies may be.

In fact, while no new power bloc structure has yet emerged to replace the Cold War antagonism, it is not difficult to envisage some possibilities. One would be a revived Russia, perhaps not with the support of the former eastern European satellites, but maybe in league with Middle East states and India, challenging what was basically the Western side in the Cold War. In Russia some capitalists are complaining that the Yeltsin administration has "sold out to the USA", and may be after revenge for what was after all a humiliating defeat by their American rivals. Whatever happens here it is clear, however, that continuing punitive actions are envisaged against recalcitrant Third World states like Iraq. This thinking appears to be important to the design of EFA and the role envisaged for it.

Arms exports
Russia is in the equation already in another role, as an arms exporter. Previous arms drives have created a large stockpile of weapons, and conversion of factories to other purposes is not the simple cheap operation some imagine. Such a sales drive would put Russia into direct competition with the EFA consortium. Future markets in India and Saudi Arabia have been mooted for EFA, following the successes there with earlier BAe aircraft such as Canberra, Lightning and Tornado. An existing arms stockpile is also a factor in current German thinking, as they took over a sizeable force of MiGs as a result of reunification. Germany is remaining as a partner in the development phase of EFA, and will therefore continue to benefit from the considerable technological development which a new military aircraft involves. Spain, whose continued part in the production phase is also in doubt, has a less advanced aircraft industry and is even keener to see out the development period.

Many of these arguments are being put forward in the "Campaign to save EFA", currently spearheaded by the MSF trade union, even though they are merely capitalist concerns. We can understand the concern that the workers involved feel at the implications of these events on their employment prospects and their life in general.

Socialists can in general support efforts by workers to stave off threatened sackings, which are by no means always doomed to failure. In fact such action should, when required, be part of the more general effort to defend, and improve where possible, pay and working conditions. The thing about this particular campaign which forces us into a critical position is its begging-bowl attitude, and the class compromise involved in taking on board purely capitalist arguments. This weakness is reinforced by a willingness to cooperate in the unending efficiency drives, “team talks”, business plans and other paraphernalia typical of developed hi-tech capitalist firms striving to keep their place in face of the current slump. In anything other than the very immediate short term, this is no more than feeding the mouth that bites you, and this socialists are totally unable to support.

The latest MSF journal (No.3, 1992) contains the almost obligatory article entitled "Save EFA" on its front page. Much of its argument consists of telling the British and German capitalist class how they should run their own affairs. The German counter-proposal for a smaller, lighter aircraft is dismissed out of hand because of its short operational range, as if that should concern workers. One alternative, that of "buying off the shelf’ which in practice means buying American, the point made is that the only aircraft which would be superior to EFA is the F22, which will not be in service until the year 2000. Again, this is a question which capitalist governments need to consider, but not workers.

Job losses
We can acknowledge that the main concern of MSF is with the job prospects of its members, but it is the way they go about protecting them that is so open to criticism. The whole concept of “saving jobs” by persuading the capitalists to "buy British” rather than a foreign alternative is fatally flawed. The jobs “saved" here represent jobs lost elsewhere with no real chance of a significant overall gain. This can only be achieved if the capitalists can be forced to employ more workers on a project than are required on strict capitalist criteria. This might lead to the Daily Express talking about three men doing two men’s work, but so what? The workers retained will benefit and that is basically the only reason why unions exist at all. What is more, it can be achieved, admittedly only in the more favourable cases, in the same way as pay increases can be negotiated in the face of capitalist opposition. The fact that, despite the present severe slump, the earnings of most of those workers who have remained in work are outpacing inflation shows that the unions are not as helpless as many seem to think. It is true that this is inevitably patchy, that it cannot directly help those out of work or living in the Third World, and is accompanied by the negative features such as labour intensification and more unsocial hours.

Any attempt to protect jobs by trying to influence directly the way employers conduct their business, so that they sell more of their particular products, leads to compromising situations which can only benefit the capitalists in the end. Employers prefer us to waste our time devising alternative strategies for them rather than have us further our own interests. The 'Save EFA” campaign is actually much worse than making this or that thing with British rather than “foreign" labour. The campaign is one for the building of military aircraft which can be designed for no other purposes than those which will inevitably kill and maim fellow workers abroad and sometimes at home also. Even if going ahead with EFA did mean more jobs, and even if having an extra design, with its concomitant development phases, might mean a few extra people at work for a time, this military aspect is one which socialists cannot and will not support however much we may sympathize with anxieties of the workers involved.

E. C. Edge

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

Keynes — in the land of the sinking sun (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade, Japan has been portrayed as a non-stop growing economy based on new concepts of social harmony that somehow made it different from the other major industrial powers which were characterized by strikes and general social unrest as well as by inferior production records. The Japanese workers employed by the big multinationals such as Nissan, Sony and Honda were looked after in terms of regular employment, access to company hospitals and modern housing. Workers and managers wore the same company-style clothes, ate in the same canteens and worked in teams on the production line where the responsibility was shared by the team, with a resultant increase in production.

The Japanese economy has tripled in size since 1967. To many observers Japan has been, in economic terms, “the Land of the Rising Sun”. The Labour Party have been impressed to the extent that they suggested in their 1991 Policy Review document that the management of the Japanese economy indicated how a country can work its way out of recession:

  In Japan they train their way out of recession . . . Wc want to create a new training culture across British industry, one which recognises the relationship between training, innovation and profit.

With this rapid growth in the Japanese economy and the resulting surplus of funds available to Japanese banks huge loans were made abroad for the purchase of assets which were perceived to be cheap. By June 1990 Japanese banks had 12.4 percent of American assets or $408 billion-worth (Economist, 18 January 1992). The scale of this lending abroad is exemplified by the State of California. In the inflationary 1980s nearly every new office block in downtown Los Angeles was financed by the Japanese. The Japanese banks own the fifth, sixth and seventh largest banks in California.

Today, however, Japan faces an accelerating banking crisis as asset values inevitably decline as the world economy, including Japan, enters the deflationary phase of a world depression.This has resulted in a credit crunch and the consequent downgrading of the credit rating of Japanese banks and institutions. Because the accounting methods of Japanese banks fail to report loan defaults for periods as long as a year after the borrower has stopped paying, and because the Finance Ministry in Tokyo will not compel the banks to report them, the American regulatory authorities are rigorously examining the accounts with the result that the banks have to make higher loss provisions. These problems can be duplicated in Europe, Australia and throughout the industrial world.

The property boom in Japan involved levels of borrowing exceeding that of the UK and the USA. Mortgages of 99 years are not uncommon and housing is bought as an investment as well as a place to live with a view to passing it on to future generations. Availability of land is an important factor since Japan is a mountainous country, 68 percent of which is uninhabitable. Although in land area it is roughly the size of Italy the population—twice that of Italy— is confined to an area about the size of Austria.

This inevitably affects land prices and the banks have accumulated property loans on both domestic and commercial property. A one-bedroom flat in Tokyo could cost $500,000 before the market began to fall. Furthermore, large sections of the Japanese population have used the property they were buying as collateral for further bank loans to invest in the Japanese stock market. Along with the banks and institutions buying shares, this pushed the Nikkei Dow index to astronomic levels.

The Japanese economy is now moving into recession following on the banking crisis and credit crunch. Property prices are on the slide, business bankruptcies are increasing. The major Japanese banks have been put on credit watch by the major debt rating agencies. The worsening economic conditions are reflected as elsewhere in social disorder, as instanced by riots in Osaka:

  Trouble flared on Thursday after labourers tried to storm a municipal centre in protest against a decision to cut benefits to many of the local jobless, who do not qualify for full unemployment pay . . . About 2500 riot police dispersed hundreds of protesters early yesterday after cars and bicycles were set ablaze . . . Japan's unemployment rate is only 2.2 percent but that disguises the fact that many companies arc saddled with surplus staff, whose jobs may be in danger.

(Daily Telegraph, 3 October).

In a recent quarterly report the Bank of Japan acknowledged the worsening state of the economy:

  The outlook for profits, sales and investment were all down . . . The survey was reinforced by Nippon Steels forecast of a 74.6 percent drop in pre-tax profits for the half year ending this month . . . Job losses have so far been relatively few but with consumer demand waning, output falling, inventories growing and profits plunging many economists say it is only a matter of time before the manufacturing sector contracts with big job losses. (Financial Times, 13 September).

Some workers deemed to be no longer useful to their companies are being paid to stay at home but this is unlikely to continue indefinitely.

As in other countries the ruling politicians have been making proposals in order to convince the public “that something is being done to put things right”. And it is Keynesian methods that have been proposed as the solution: injecting large sums of money into the economy in order to upgrade the infrastructure. Undoubtedly the infrastructure badly needs improving. The bulk of the Japanese population do not enjoy the facilities of those who work for the big corporations. Sixty percent still live in backward agrarian conditions in dwellings whose toilets are not connected to outside main sewers. Japans roads are not adequate for the traffic which has increased five times in the last 25 years (Wall Street Journal, 28 September). Traffic holdups 50 miles long are not infrequent. But this is not the reason for the proposed Keynesian spending spree on which the government has embarked.

These plans have already run into difficulties about how the government should finance them:

  Mr Hat, Japanese Finance Minister, giving a lecture in Tokyo ruled out a return to special borrowing to finance the emergency spending package announced in August. He also rejected demands from retailers and industrial leaders for an income tax cut in 1993 to boost flagging consumption . . . His comments signal an intensification of the political struggle over how the government should finance higher public spending, which is virtually the only domestic source of economic growth at the moment. (Financial Times. 30 September, our emphasis).

In other words, the economy is moving into deep depression with zero growth in the private sector. So how can the Keynesian-inspired government bail-out plan revive the Japanese economy? Attempts to avert slumps by increased public spending have never yet been effective in a contracting economy. It failed to revive the American economy in the depression of the 1930s in spite of schemes such as the Boulder Dam under the New Deal. There are many similarities between the 1929 crash in the USA and the crash that is beginning now in Japan where the Nikkei Dow has lost over 60 percent of its value. The instability of the Japanese banking sector bears some comparison with the state of the American prior to Roosevelt closing them.

The socialist analysis, using the scientific Marxist economic approach, shows that this proposed solution (or any like it that are propounded by the Labour Party) is doomed to failure. The world depression that today engulfs all countries in varying stages, and the human tragedies that go with it of which the Osaka incident is but one example, are inherent contradictions of the capitalist system whether market-orientated or state “controlled” and cannot be solved by tinkering about with government finances.

But Japan may prove to be different in one sense, namely that the depression may reach depths not seen in previous ones as the huge mountain of debt is liquidated. The world depression is causing contraction in the Japanese economy and is exposing the phoney myth of permanent Japanese social tranquillity between workers and employers. The economic sun is no longer rising in the East. It is sinking and taking Keynesian theory with it.

Terry Lawlor

Letters: Yugoslavia (1992)

Letters to the Editors from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yugoslavia

Dear Editors,

I am writing to query what seem to me certain anomalies in the article on the bloodshed in Yugoslavia (September Socialist Standard). The writer states that uneven economic development amongst the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia is the primary factor behind the conflict. Specifically, it is said that the capitalists of Slovenia and Croatia were reluctant to see their profits “exported” to fund development in the poorer republics. Hence the pro-independence policies of their respective governments.

The above is undoubtedly true but it still leaves the position of the workers in these two republics unexplained. According to the article, free elections were held in Croatia and Slovenia in 1990 in which parties promoting secession from Yugoslavia were victorious. This must mean that the majority of workers voted for these policies. The reason they voted so would appear to be that they could expect vastly improved earnings as workers in a capitalist Slovenia or Croatia rather than a capitalist Yugoslavia; a figure of possibly up to six times as much is mentioned in the article. This again is a straightforward result of the uneven development. Further they obviously felt little ethnic kinship for their fellow workers in the rump state of Yugoslavia.

Thus the writer’s comment that workers have been injected with nationalism by unscrupulous capitalists would seem simplistic. It would appear that both capitalists and workers in the breakaway republics had a material interest in going it alone. Hence the governments, being elected, acted accordingly to carry out the aspirations of both sections of society.

Yugoslavia is but one historical instance where the economic demands of capitalism and nationalism have combined, resulting in human tragedy. To prevent its repetition, by being able to explain to workers its causes, it is necessary to understand these phenomena fully. Perhaps questions such as the nature of the state; the role of government and what forces in a "democratic” capitalist society it represents; and the influence of nationalism and ethnic culture in forming workers’ political views and modifying their experience of the class struggle could be explored in future issues of the Socialist Standard.

Kevin Cronin

Belfast

Reply:
No doubt the workers in Slovenia and Croatia who voted for pro-independence parties perceived this to be in their economic interest, but this does not mean that independence will in fact make any substantial difference to their economic situation.

The article did not say that their wages could go up by as much as six times. It merely recorded that the average wages in Slovenia were reputedly six times as much as in Kosovo, the most backward part of former Yugoslavia. This was due to economic rather than political considerations, for instance a higher degree of industrialization and a higher level of education, training and culture amongst the working class, “a straightforward result of the uneven development” as you put it. It follows from this that independence—a change in the political superstructure—will make no difference to wage levels.
Independence will, however, mean an immense gain for the capitalists of Slovenia and Croatia in that a proportion of their profits will no longer be syphoned off to Belgrade (to pay much more for the upkeep of the Yugoslav army than for projects in backward Kosovo and Macedonia, as it happens). If the Slovenian and Croatian capitalists were to share these retained profits with their workers in the form of higher wages, then a case might be made for saying that workers as well as capitalists had a common material interest in independence. However; this would be to assume a generosity on their part never yet displayed by capitalists anywhere. Perhaps the workers who voted for independence believed that this would happen. If so, they will be sorely disappointed—Editors.


Democracy and Votes

Dear Editors.

Your cartoon in the July issue of Socialist Standard really did reach the depths of Stalinist-style amalgam tactics, in its attempt to link anarchism to Stalinism and Nazism. Not only was the cartoon scurrilous, it was also inaccurate as well. Stalin through the Comintern advised the Communist Parties worldwide to use parliamentary tactics, as was so miserably illustrated with the career of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hitler for his part used parliamentary methods, as did, and still do. other fascist parties, including Mussolini.

You say that anarchists ignore the State. On the contrary, those revolutionary anarchists who have learnt the lessons of history believe that a social revolution must involve the active destruction of the State. There is a big difference between electing MPs and mandating delegates to, for example, a workplace or neighbourhood council. The delegates to these would be decided upon by mass assemblies. and would be mandated and subject to instant recall. Parliamentarians would be under no such control of the masses. What is more alienating under capitalism than to file singly into an election booth once in every five years?

You pay lip service to self organisation and mass action. In reality, in your advocacy of parliament, including the defence of institutions like the Russian Constituent Assembly, you show yourselves as staunch defenders of bourgeois democracy.

Ron Allen, 

Anarchist Communist Federation 

London E1

Reply:
Thanks for the compliment! Yes, we do say that the vote is an important gain and we do say that “bourgeois” democracy, for all its many limitations, provides the best framework for workers to organise themselves without leaders—both to defend their interests under capitalism and to struggle to replace it by the fully democratic society that socialism will be. What are you saying? That it makes no difference whether or not we have the vote? We don’t think you will get very far with that one— Editors.

Sting in the Tail: What's Up Doc? (1992)

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

What's Up Doc?

In the Observer Magazine (27 Sept.) under the headline Poverty Makes You Sick, a doctor John Collie wrote:

  There is one piece of health advice which is more effective than all the others. One guaranteed way to live longer, grow taller, avoid chronic illness, have healthier children, increase your quality of life and minimise your risk of premature death. The secret is: be rich — because all the major health indicators are directly related to income. People living in poverty are not simply 'less comfortable' than everyone else — they have shorter lives, sicker children and babies which are more likely to die in infancy.

So there you have it, fellow workers; stop whingeing, just get rich.


Dying For A Job

Here is some heartening news for those workers who are still managing to hold on to a job.

  Losing your job increases your chances of dying, according to new evidence. Data from the British Regional Heart Study, which has spent 10 years studying people from 253 British towns, shows that unemployment kills.
  "We have found that men we were screening who were unemployed at any time over a five-year period were more than one-and-a-half times as likely to die in the next five years as men in continuous employment" said Dr Joan Morris, lecturer in medical statistics at St Thomas's Hospital, London.

The Observer (27 September)

For those of us still with a job it is not all sunshine however.

  Stress at work is an important reason why people take time off sick, according to Dr Paul Oldershaw, head of health sciences at the Health and Safety Executive. "A 1990 Labour Force Survey suggests a national picture of around 110,000 people who regard themselves as victims of stress and depression caused by work, and 200,000 who regard themselves as having a problem made worse by their work."

Got the picture then? Out of work and facing hellish poverty problems you are more likely to snuff it; in work and you are driven nutty by the stress of it all. Aint it time we got shot of this crazy society?


Dead-End Path

The capture of Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Maoist Sendero Luminosa guerillas by Peru's security forces hit the headlines recently.

Sendero Luminosa (Shining Path) aim to do in Peru what Mao did in China — to sweep away the ruling class by armed force, and they have for years waged a ruthless and bloody war against the police, military, judiciary, politicians of both left and right and even villagers who do not toe the Maoist line.

So the old Maoist illusions live on in Peru. Sendero Luminoso imagine that the poverty of the peasants and workers can be ended by toppling Peru's rulers, but should they win power they will find, as Mao’s successors in China have found, that capitalism is a worldwide system and they must become part of it even against their own wishes.


Mixed-Up Mike

Film star Michael Caine's comments on political and social matters are a strange mixture of sense and nonsense.

A dyed-in-the-wool Tory, Caine is forever on about his working class roots but could still complain in a TV interview about council tenants having cars and, even worse, lockups to put them in when he couldn't find a parking place where he lived in Mayfair for his Rolls Royce!

That’s only some of the nonsense but he can make sense too. For example, he recognises that the Labour Party isn't socialist and just look at this comment on religion:

  I'm born of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. I was educated in a Jewish school and I'm married to a Moslem. None of these religions has made a mark on me because I see the cant and hypocrisy In them. Each one teaches prejudice.

Dally Express (23 September)

The Dirty Work

Anyone who wants to know who will do the dirty work in socialism such as farming, should have seen a recent TV programme on the government’s "Set Aside” policy. This amounts to farmers being given money to set aside some of their land, that is grow nothing on it because of glutted food markets.

We have dealt many times in this journal with the madness of a social system where this can happen while millions starve, but there were for us some very encouraging views expressed by some of the farmers on Set Aside. They "hated” it: they didn’t want the money but wanted to use the land usefully and saw their role as being primarily one of growing things. Above all they wanted to stay on the land because they loved the life.

In socialism farming, like any other job, will be done by people who wish to do it and there looks like being no shortage of those.


A Useless Unity

Following their humiliation at the general election the Scottish National Party met in sombre mood at their conference in Perth last month.

Like any other reformist party the SNP is a loose coalition with the various strands of opinion all pulling in different directions.

There were "social democrats" ranged against pure-and-simple nationalists, supporters of the multiparty "Scotland United" movement versus go-it-alone hardliners, nationalises clashing with "regulators" CNDers opposed by "defence realists", and so on.

There were, however, two things on which unity was total; the complete acceptance of capitalism and a blind belief, despite all the evidence, in their ability to tame It.

50 Years Ago: The Ugly Reality of Indian Nationalism (1992)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received a request to give our support to a joint manifesto in favour of the Indian Nationalist movement, and the following resolution has been sent in reply to it:—

  We are not willing to give our support to a joint manifesto in conjunction with other political parties endorsing the Indian Nationalist movement. As Socialists we are opposed to the exploitation of the toilers either by foreign or native exploiters. As that exploitation can be ended only by the achievement of Socialism. through international working-class action, we are opposed to the Indian Nationalist movement which has capitalist aims and is not deserving of working-class support. We are also not prepared to associate with non-Socialist political parties.

(...)
The fact that we are opposed to the Indian Nationalist movement does not mean that we acquiesce in the brutal suppression of which the Indians have been victims. We are opposed to the capitalist system wherever it raises its ugly head, but we know that the solution to the workers’ subjective position under it is the same everywhere.

The only road to salvation for the Indian worker is the road to socialism, and he must travel along that road in brotherly harmony with the members of his class throughout the world.

[From a statement signed “Executive Committee, S.P.G.B”, Socialist Standard, November 1942.]

King Market kills King Coal (1992)

Editorial from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even die-hard supporters of capitalism were stunned by the announcement. Over the next six months 31 of Britain’s 50 remaining pits were to close, throwing 30,000 coal miners onto the industrial scrapheap.

Michael Heseltine, once billed as the acceptable face of capitalism, spoke as if he were Margaret the Mad Marketeer herself. There was no alternative. It was a straightforward commercial decision. Gas had out-competed coal in the marketplace. "British Coal cannot go on producing coal that cannot be sold". To subsidise coal for power stations would be to keep electricity prices 3 per cent higher than they need be. British manufacturing industry had to "compete in an increasingly competitive world". That meant "we have to search for opportunities to lower costs". This was one and the government had seized it. The electricity companies were right to go for gas. British Coal was right to shut down more than half the British coal industry. The economic case for this was "unanswerable". Tough luck on the miners and too bad about past government promises of no compulsory redundancies. Well, to tell the truth, he didn't actually say this last. But that in effect was what he was saying.

In terms of the logic of capitalism he was right. Under capitalism production is in the hands of business enterprises, private or state, all competing to try to make profits. To stay in the race for profits you have to keep your costs down. If you don't then you go to the wall. Which is what happened to British Coal. They cannot supply coal to their main customers, the privatised electricity companies, at a competitive price, and they are suffering the consequences.

The Market has given its verdict and the sentence has to be carried out. As usual the victims are members of the working class. Not only the miners and their families, and the communities in which they live, but the tens of thousands of other workers employed in servicing the pits and in transporting the coal. They will join the 3,000,000 already on the dole in this, the biggest slump since the 1930s.

British Coal is crying "unfair competition" and some are saying they have a point. Nuclear power, originally developed as a by-product of the Bomb, is being subsidised, partly still for military reasons. Gas, it is predicted, will only temporarily be cheaper than coal. Maybe, but even if governments don't have to let so short-term market considerations apply as the Tories now are, they still have to take market trends into account. You can’t buck the market. But the way the market is going to jump can't be predicted very far in advance. The relative prices of the various fuels — coal, oil, gas, nuclear power — are continuously changing.

The fact is that the market nature of the capitalist system rules out the adoption of any rational, long-term energy policy. In the 40s and 50s coal was the cheapest fuel and the government based its energy policy on this. Then in the 60s the price of oil fell below that of coal and the Labour government of the day embarked on a massive pit closure programme. In the 70s oil prices again rose above that of coal and the miners were able to exploit the situation to win two national strikes over wages, in 1972 and 1974. The government turned to nuclear power. In the 80s oil prices fell again and the government took on and, as we can now see, completely smashed the miners union. Now gas has emerged as the cheapest fuel and a "dash for gas” is on. It is not difficult to see where this is going to end. Already the papers are talking about a "massive overcapacity in generation if all the plans for gas-fired capacity go ahead" and saying that "many of the new gas power stations face a limited life". (Daily Telegraph, 14 October)

So in a few years time some of the gas power stations will be closing because, just as with coal today, productive capacity will be beyond market capacity. The Market will be demonstrating its madness again.

The case against the market system is unanswerable. What we need is a society where all the means of producing wealth are owned in common, so that they can be used to produce what we need not what the market dictates. Only then, in the absence of market forces and vested capitalist interests, can a rational energy policy be adopted.

Readers Survey Results (1992)

Party News from the November 1992 issue of the  Socialist Standard

If the 245 who replied to the questionnaire in the August issue are representative of Socialist Standard readers generally, then our most popular regular feature is "Sting in the Tail", all but 16 percent of you like the front covers and 83 percent think the price is about right.

The main topics that the largest number of you think do not get enough coverage are music, women's issues, longer analytical articles and Marxist theory. On the other hand, you think we give too much space to leftwing parties, Russia and Eastern Europe and British politics.

Seventy per cent get your Socialist Standard through subscription, 12 percent from a street seller or at a meeting, 7 percent from a bookshop or newsagent, while 8 percent received a free copy from our publicity department at Head Office. Two, in a practice we wouldn't recommend, extracted the questionnaire from the copy in their local library. Over half said more than one person read their copy, so we can conclude that our readership is at least 50 percent higher than our sales.

There is a massive imbalance between men and women, with only 7 percent of you being women. Otherwise, all age groups arc represented in proportions not too different from the general population. The same goes for where you live, with 24 percent in London and 13 percent in the rest of the South East and 11 percent in the Northwest. Five percent live overseas.

Your political and reading habits contained some surprises: 22 percent of you voted Labour in the last election, while the most-read other magazine is Socialist Worker (11 percent). Besides the 22 percent who voted Labour, 41 percent of you wrote “ socialism” or something similar on your ballot paper; 27 percent didn't vote. More voted for the Liberal Democrats (7) than voted for the Green Party (6).

Fifty-nine percent of you are not members of any political party. 29 percent are in the Socialist Party, 4 percent in the Labour Party and 7 percent in various other parties. Thirty-eight percent are trade union members, 10 percent are in some environmental group like Friends of the Earth and 7 percent in Amnesty International or some other human rights group.

The most-read national daily newspapers are the Guardian (41 percent), the Independent (20 percent) and the Daily Mirror (11 percent). On Sunday 26 percent of you read the Observer and 11 percent the Independent on Sunday. Ten percent confessed to reading a Tory tabloid on weekdays and 7 percent on Sundays.

As to other magazines, after Socialist Worker come other trotskyist and Leninist journals (9 percent), Private Eye (7 percent), the New Statesman (6 percent) and anarchist journals (5 percent).

Market not the only way to live (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many organisations (including the United Nations, Oxfam and Christian Aid) know the world has the resources for all humanity to live comfortably.

The question therefore comes to mind—why isn't the whole of humanity living comfortably?

The worldwide organisation of society will not allow human needs to be met. “Needs" are measured by the “market”. You can have anything you want, from baked beans to human beings, as long as you can afford to pay for it. We all know that what we want and need and what we can afford are not necessarily the same thing.

Supporters of the market would defend it by saying “the market system rewards hard work and enterprise". Following this “logic" means coming up with the ridiculous conclusion that because of what they are paid some people can work a hundred times harder than a nurse or an ambulance driver.

Surely the very fact that present society has the capacity for everyone to live comfortably but won’t allow this to happen is in itself proof that a new society is needed?

 

Those who argue against “market forces” in the NHS should consider being against market forces in all areas of life.

Those who do not want to pay the poll tax but will pay (however grudgingly) for everything else should consider the idea that we should not have to pay for anything, i.e. that we should organise society to provide all goods and services free for all.

Those opposed to the obscenity and insanity of millions starving while food is stored and destroyed should also consider the case for producing goods and services for needs instead of the current "pay or do without” and "profit before need” society.

Those who believe there is basically nothing wrong with the money system should ask themselves, doesn't the very existence of thousands of reform groups and charities tell you otherwise?

The society of mansions and cardboard boxes isn't the only way to live. You owe it to yourself to find out about the alternative.

Brendan Cummings

"Too many" bricks (1992)

From the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The notion that the price mechanism is the most efficient allocator of resources took a further blow recently with the confirmation that Britain has a massive "oversupply" of bricks, concrete blocks and other building materials and a deepening housing crisis.

Despite increased homelessness, record levels of house repossession and rising council house waiting lists throughout the country, figures released by the Department of the Environment and leading construction companies show the house-building industry to be still in severe slump.

The output of the construction industry is now five percent lower that it was in the second quarter of last year, itself a period of sharp downturn. Redundancies have escalated and the industry's workforce has fallen by a further 13 percent over the last year.

The brick-making sector of the construction industry has been particularly badly hit. According to the Daily Telegraph (12 September), the major construction firm Tarmac is to close four plants producing a total of 100 million bricks a year, while concrete block factories in Nuneaton, Dumfries, Fleet and Bracknell also face shutdown.

With the decline in paying demand total UK brick sales have fallen from a peak of 4,270 million in 1988 to an estimated 3,100 million for 1992. Meanwhile, as homelessness continued to rise 1,473 million of brick stocks built up last year, the price mechanism once again demonstrating its inability to marry production with real human demand—in hosing as in other sectors of the economy.

The gulf between the total productive capacity capable of meeting human needs and the actual utilization of productive forces to meet paying demand in capitalism has been highlighted by, ironically enough, stockbroking firm BZW. They have estimated that despite rising real needs for housing, paying market demand in the building sector for materials is back to the level of 1986, when construction was just emerging from the previous slump of the early 1980s.

Furthermore, BZW estimate there to be excess productive capacity of 20 percent in the brick industry, 42 percent in ready-mixed concrete, 38 percent in crushed rock, 35 percent in plasterboard, 26 percent in both concrete blocks and roof tiles, and 25 percent in cement.

Bizarre though it may seem to rational individuals, some supporters of capitalism consider their system to be highly efficient, incorporating the best system of distribution known to humankind. But what sort of efficiency piles up stocks of useful materials and imposes market penalties, i.e. loss of profitability, as a disincentive to utilize an artificially "excess" capacity?

Though it is a good example, the construction industry is not, of course, alone in demonstrating the absurdity of the capitalist system of production. Most spheres of manufacturing are now faced with declining or static market demand, with wholesalers and retailers cutting back on orders as stocks of unsold goods pile up. According to a recent CBI survey, 63 percent of wholesalers are cutting back on their orders from manufacturing, while 45 percent of retailers are reducing orders from their suppliers (Guardian, 11 September).

This crazy situation of overcapacity and falling paying demand for commodities amidst increasing need, poverty, homelessness, and—in the "Third World"—mass starvation, has to be ended. And the sooner the better. The madness of the market will have to give way to a co-ordinated system of production for use, with free access to the goods, materials and services available to society.

It's time to put capitalism out of its misery and thereby help put us—the world working class—out of ours.

Dave Perrin

Between the Lines: Parsons, Baker & Quayle (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the November 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Culture and Chips

"The trouble with the working class today is that they're such peasants."

So began Tony Parsons's thirty-minute moan about lager louts, football stadiums and dogs called Tyson. (The Tattooed Jungle, C4, Monday, 5 October, 9.30pm). The same night, before watching this poor man's Matthew Arnold vent his frustration against the karaoke culture which he lacked the intelligence to connect with the cash-and-flog-it standards of capitalism, I watched Noel Edmonds present that hateful half-hour of working class self-abasement, Telly Addicts (BBC1, 7pm).

In this quiz for couch potatoes, families with scholarships in TV drivel compete to prove who can remember the most inanities, banalities and famous names. It is knowledge diluted to the purest spectacle: you don't need to have been anywhere or read anything to win Telly Addicts, but you need to have a fine-tuned memory for what imaginary one-dimensional TV stars have done, said or hummed as their theme tunes. The proles as peasants? A case could be made.

Tony Parsons makes the case very poorly. Parsons is the essential Essex Man. He romanticizes "the good old working class" who loved Churchill, went in for (k)nobbly knees contests in holiday camps and passed away the time scrubbing doorsteps and working diligently. Parsons bemoans the rise of the lager-lout patriots and the boneheads with tattoos who never read books. He is too stupid to realize that nationalism thrives upon the irrational callousness which he deplores; the two go together. And perhaps the lack of book reading is a result of half the libraries being shut and schools having only one book between five pupils.

In fact, in Britain today far more workers visit museums every year than go to football matches - and the vast majority of football spectators are neither drunk nor violent. Modern Britain is not filled with workers who never read: despite the overwhelming financial advantage of the film and video industry, it is still the case that millions of workers regularly read books, journals and newspapers which are not tabloids; only a minority of wage slaves read the Sun and get off on Rambo movies.  

Could it just be possible that, like the vicars whose bleak view of human life is derived from the nasty circles they mix in, Parsons's conception of the proletarian peasant is derived from spending too much time staring angrily into the mirror and seeing what Basildon has done to him? Like a black lackey supporting slavery, Parsons the Conservative called in Auberon Waugh (the voice of the modern slave owners) to add his sneers to Parsons's vitriol.

Waugh hates the working class for not knowing their place. Our place, in case anyone wants to know, is trembling in fear at the innate superiority of the inherited privilege of Waugh and his indolent, mind-stunted class of legalized thieves, but at least Waugh's hatred is against a class which is a real potential threat to him. (Stated plainly, a socialist majority will have no time to entertain the snobbery of old Auberon - we shall undoubtedly declare war on Waugh).

Tony Parsons's nostalgia for 1950s' conservatism is not only without taste or sense, but is the moronic cry of a slave for his chains to be tightened. And when he stated of workers that "If you treat them like animals they act like animals, if you treat them like humans they still act like animals" what is that but an inelegant chant of the stale old human nature myth? Danny Baker, who earns a fortune pretending to be a good old cockney lad, explained violence on the football terraces as coming from the same source that causes wars; healthy young hetero males like a good old punch-up, don't they John? Tony Parsons has reason to feel anguish, for when he looks to the future the prospect of a TV peasantry with Danny Boy Baker as the Pearly King and himself as the proley court jester-cum-philosopher is a nightmare worse than being in an Indian restaurant in Basildon on a Friday night after closing time.

THE POLITICIAN WHO WAS DEFEATED BY A FICTITIOUS CHARACTER

By the time that you read this you will know whether Dan Quayle has been re-elected as American Vice-President, White House dope and speller-in-chief of very short words. If he is defeated it will have no small relationship to the attack made on him on the networked US sit-com, Murphy Brown. To be precise, the first attack was made by Quayle when he made a speech appealing to the Christian loonies calling for imaginary TV characters to act more responsibly and set the nation a better moral example. The example he gave was Murphy Brown who decided to go ahead with a pregnancy even though she was not married. Quayle's attack backfired when the show's makers broadcast an episode in which the fictitious character, watched on TV the Quayle speech attacking her conduct and them proceeded to tear to pieces his moral self-righteousness.

The episode of the show drew the biggest audience on US TV since the episode of Dallas in which J.R. was shot. So now elections are won and lost in America by TV-style politicians debating with non-existent TV characters - and the invisible debaters win! All they need  to do now is to have a fictitious TV audience (paid extras to fill a vast Oprah Winfrey studio, perhaps?) and the whole election could be run on TV without real life having to intervene at all.

Steve Coleman