News in Review: Labour at Scarborough (1963)

The News in Review column from the November 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

POLITICS

Labour at Scarborough

The last time the Labour Party went to Scarborough for its Annual Conference, the unilateralists won the day and the delegates went home amid the bitter recriminations provoked by Gaitskell’s promise to fight, fight and fight again.

This year, under Wilson’s surer, craftier hand, Labour has had a happier time of it. According to the Daily Telegraph, the party leadership regard their 1963 Conference as exhilarating. A more accurate word for it would be nauseating.

Because, apart from anything else which was evident at the Conference, the Labour Party has so obviously dropped almost everything that it ever stood for. Nationalisation of the land has been quietly replaced under the carpet, until some other member who mistakenly thinks that he belongs to a party of principle brings it out again. A Labour government will keep the public schools in existence—not an unexpected decision, especially as so many of the Labour leadership went to such schools themselves. The earnings rule for old age pensioners, which cuts their pension if they earn a bit of money on the side, is to stay in force; after all, no government could ever be accused of wanting to make the life of a retired worker too easy. Wage restraint will be the policy of a Labour government, dignified now by the new, Frank Cousins euphemism of a ”planned growth of wages.”

Now the Labour Party, even in the days when it stood openly and proudly for wholesale nationalisation, abolition of the Monarchy, higher wages and all sorts of other pet Left Wing schemes, was not a Socialist Party, for the simple reason that none of these things have anything to do with Socialism. But at least in those days they seemed to stand for something a little different from their opponents and in that belief many people joined the party and worked for what they thought was going to be a brave new world.

And now? The Labour Party today stands for only one thing; to win as many votes as possible. All their policies, all their statements, even the contributions at the Conference, were overshadowed by the coming election which they hope so confidently to win. Any hint of a quarrel which-“would have made copy for the Tory-press was squashed. (Wilson is a master at sorting out these disputes without a public row, yet getting what he wants.) Some subjects, like foreign policy, were not allowed on the agenda because they had caused such an uproar in past years. The Conference did its best to avoid any mention of the Denning Report, with its undertones of “immoral Toryism”; only that dreadful fellow Ted Hill was uncouth enough to break this rule.

The big scheme to provide more scientists, and more opportunities for their work, is regarded as a potential vote winner. Writing in The Guardian on October 4th, Richard Crossman told how Wilson had first mentioned the matter to him, just after Gaitskell had died:

“I know that most of them (the scientists) voted for us in 1945,” I said, “but by 1959 four fifths of them had become anti-working class and anti-Labour.” “Well, the only way to win them back is to make Labour the party of science . . .” (said Wilson).

This is the end of an inevitable process, foreseen by Socialists when the Labour Party first came into existence. A party which aims for power within capitalism must appeal to the ignorance of the working class whom it wants to vote for it. And the end of that is a shameless chasing after votes, with every pronouncement intended as a lasso to rope in the floating voter.

Today, more obviously than ever, the Labour Party is an alternative administration for British capitalism. It is, in fact, another Conservative Party, even if it is one which is trying to shake off the uncomfortable memories of a history strewn with discredited theories and what passed at one time for political principles.

AT HOME

The Denning Report

Lord Denning’s famous report must have been a bitter disappointment to those workers who had looked forward to brightening their dull lives with a judicially worded account of which minister had been sleeping with which model and using whose car to run her about in. Even the bizarre figure of the naked waiter had the sting taken out of him by the simple fact that Denning interviewed the man. This may be the end of the Profumo affair. No more is the press obviously seething with suppressed rumours, as it was last spring. The Daily Mirror hastily dropped the matter, in favour of pointing up the new Labour image as an energetic, forward looking party of the scientific future.

Before the scandal finally dies, then, perhaps we may be allowed our say. Profumo’s supposed sin was that he lied to the House of Commons; but if every politician who had done that were forced to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds . . . Capitalism is full of lies; it cannot, indeed, exist without its representatives continually trying to mislead people, sometimes under the excuse of military security, sometimes on the grounds of commercial interests, sometimes not even on these justifications.

And the morals of capitalist politicians should not be a concern of the working class. There have been plenty of “moral” political leaders, as well as many who have led a more interesting, if more complicated, private life. They have all administered capitalism in roughly the same way, which is never pleasant for the people who work, and vote, for capitalism. The real scandal is that millions of people are exploited, degraded and suppressed by capitalism yet continue to support it. Beside that monstrous fact, Profumo and the seamy world in which he moved is put into its proper historical insignificance.

Fall Out

While we are on the subject of lies, we should comment on one of the most recent examples of capitalism’s trying to mislead us.

For years, we have been assured by the politicians and by the military men that fall out from bomb tests was nothing to get worried about. Only the neurotic, they said, would get worked up over the latest multi-megaton blast off and such people, after all, are not the stiff-backed, firm-jawed specimens that a military nation needs. (Some of this propaganda was almost like Feiffer’s famous cartoon in The Observer some years ago, which had the government stick up massive posters which told the population that Black Spots Are Good For You.)

Now some of the facts about the recent levels of fall out are coming to light and they are enough to make the most placid person sit up and take notice. The latest annual report of the Radiobiological Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Council tells us that 1962 was the worst year on record for fall out. The level of the deadly strontium in our diet was higher last year than at any time since detailed records were first opened in 1958. For 1963 the picture promises to be even blacker.

Sir John Cockcroft, who was once the Director of the Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell, has revealed that at least once during the last two years consideration had to be given to stopping the supply of fresh milk to children, because of the fears about the high radioactive contamination of it. And there were other indications of the threat to life which the atomic age means to us.

The fact that the official lies about fall out have been nailed will not, of course, prevent similar lies being told in the future. Nor, if the past is any guide, does it mean that the working class will indignantly reject the lies and all that goes with them. Nevertheless, we shall continue to point out that capitalism lives by its terror and its destructive forces and that it bolsters these up with lies. Yet it claims to be a “moral” system of society, in which truth and honesty are respected. Perhaps that is its biggest lie of all.

Morals at Benenden

No hint of immorality, at least of one kind, down at Benenden School in Kent, where Princess Anne is continuing to learn how to be an upper-crust young lady.

Going down to the local church of a Sunday, the princess heard the vicar tell her:

“Don’t be obsessed with sex, the newspapers, radio etc., can deal with nothing else. Forget it, it is only a trifle compared with the search for the Kingdom . . . Some of you girls may one day find yourselves working in a big office and you will find it an awful rat race . . . Do not be involved in this sort of thing . . . You should not worry about it . . . It is no good trying to ‘keep up ‘ for the sake of ‘keeping up’”.

Nice sentiments—for the Benenden girls, at any rate. They are rich enough to be able to avoid the nastier economic consequences of sexual promiscuity, anyway. Those consequences are reserved for the working class. So is the worry about the results of more “acceptable” sexual activity, which often lands a working class man and wife with a child which they cannot afford and therefore do not welcome. The ruling class avoid these problems for the simple reason that they have enough money to do so. For them, sex, in any shape or form, may easily be a trifle.

Did the princess and her chums have a good giggle at the bit about ending up in the rat race in a big office? This again is something reserved for the daughters of the working class. They are the people who get involved in “that sort of thing,” they are the people who try to “keep up,” they are the people who do the worrying about whether they are making the grade.

The text of the sermon was “Do not worry, put your trust in God,” And, of course, in the dividend cheques.

ABROAD

Ben Bella takes over

Ben Bella, President of the Algerian Republic, has now taken over full dictatorial powers and has had these confirmed by an extraordinary session of the Algerian National Assembly.

This has followed an internal struggle in the Algerian government, in which Ben Bella has ousted his rivals one by one and has gradually strengthened his hold on the country in the process.

There are a number of ironies in this situation.

The “full powers” which the Assembly gave to Ben Bella are not clear in their scope. This was a dodge frequently resorted to by French governments in the days of the Fourth Republic. Such measures usually meant some attack upon whatever democracy existed in France at the time. In the war in which the F.L.N. was then engaged against the French government, the Algerian Nationalists used the promise of liberty freely in their propaganda. Anyone who has learned anything of recent history will not be surprised to hear that one of the first casualties of the successful nationalist revolution is the democracy which they claimed to be fighting for.

It is ironical, too, that Ben Bella should have resorted to a measure which his opponents of yesterday found so useful. The French government used every trick in the game in the war against the F.L.N. and the Algerian propagandists were not slow to make capital out of the fact. Are they silent, now that their leader has shown that he is willing to learn from everyone—even his former enemies?

And what about those Algerians who fought so long and so bloodily against French rule? Are they satisfied, now that one form of oppression has been replaced by another? And those do-gooders who are forever seeking out nationalist movements, preferably on the African continent, to support? Will they realise that such movements seek only to impose an indigenous capitalist class upon a country and that in the end this can turn out as bad, or worse, for the people of that country as the foreign rule they were persuaded to take arms against?

Surplus in the States

In America they are still battling with the problem of their surplus grain. Some of it they have given away (under strictly controlled conditions, of course), some of it they have stored in ships and in silos. Some of it has never been grown, by the simple process of paying farmers not to cultivate their land. But the stuff keeps piling up; there is now about 1,200 million bushels of it.

The latest solution to be offered to this problem has come from two United States Senators. They want the grain burnt for conversion into alcohol, backed up by legislation to ensure that all petrol sold in the States contains a certain percentage of the grain alcohol.

This is at least something of a variation on the old idea of simply burning the stuff, which was so popular in the Thirties. Ironically, one of the Senators has pointed out that the conversion idea was put forward then, but was killed by the oil companies, who did not want anyone muscling in on their markets. Nobody cared that there were millions of unemployed, in America and elsewhere, who would rather have seen the grain turned into food which they could get their hands on. it was a more economical idea to burn it.

In the same way, it is now more economical to store the grain than to upset the world market by releasing the stuff so that it can help to relieve the monstrous problem of malnutrition and hunger which afflicts so large a part of the world’s population.

In humane terms, the problem is simpler. It would be a matter of moving the grain from one part of the world, where there was a surplus, to another part, where there was a shortage. A sane social system would do just that. But capitalism has to satisfy its profit motive before anything else and that leads it to all manner of tortuous shadow wrestling rather than tackle a problem direct.

If the Americans choose to burn their grain to make petrol for their cars instead of to feed the world’s hungry (there is, of course, no shortage of petrol in the States anyway!), they may seem to some people to be guilty of a reckless waste of the world’s resources. But by the standards which capitalism imposes on these things they will be doing something like the right thing.

Oil in the Congo

The Italian State Oil Company, ENI, has obtained a virtual monopoly of oil refining in the Belgian Congo. The foundation stone of their refinery, at Moanda on the Congo estuary, has been laid and building has started.

This has come after a certain amount of dirty work behind the scenes. A four country consortium, consisting of British and Dutch (Shell) U.S.A. (Texaco and Mobiloil) and Belgian (Petrocongo) interests, was bidding for a contract to build another refinery on the estuary, at a cost lower than the Italians are charging. It has now been revealed, after months of delaying tactics by the Congo government, that ENI had the thing sewn up a long time ago by a secret clause in the agreement which they signed with the government.

The consortium are annoyed about this. But, as the history of the Middle East has shown, oil companies could hardly exist profitably unless they signed secret agreements with foreign governments and did not pull an occasional double cross on their opponents.

Another squeal from the consortium was that the decision to let the Italians build amounted to granting a monopoly of oil refining in the Congo. Yet the four companies can hardly complain on this score, for what else was their consortium but an attempt to eliminate competitive bidding for the refining rights? And if the consortium had won a contract which excluded other oil companies, would they have then complained about monopolies? On the contrary, they would have put their public relations men to work, to point out the supposed benefits which their monopoly brought to everyone.

At such times, it is common for capitalist concerns to talk about the “rights” and the “wrongs” of a situation. But really capitalism knows not such concepts; “profitable” and “non-profitable” are its standards of judgment. When companies try to introduce their own style of morals into the jungle of capitalist interests, which they do when it suits them, they are trying to ride two horses which are travelling in exactly opposite directions.

BUSINESS

About the Chunnel

The recent report of the French and British working group did very little to clear up the confusion over the “Bridge or Tunnel”‘ Channel controversy.

This controversy, of course, has been raging for a long time and whenever there has been a threat of any sort of progress towards a solution, it has always been baulked. The reasons are drearily familiar. Not enough capital available. Not profitable enough. Opposition from other interests which have sunk money into the more established methods of getting across the Channel.

In this way, what may be one of the good ideas of the Twentieth Century has been persistently obstructed. There is nothing remarkable in this the need to conform to capitalism’s profit motive has killed countless schemes in the past, even if some of them have been good ideas from the point of view of human comfort and convenience.

Meanwhile, travellers to the Continent have been affected by the controversy. Last August, when British Railways applied for permission to close its Southampton/Le Havre ferry route, and to convert the ships into car carriers for use elsewhere, they made it plain that their application had been delayed for some time because of the uncertainty over the Tunnel. The conversion of the ships is planned as a temporary measure, to tide BR over the period before a possible Tunnel may be operating. If the Tunnel is not built, the Railways may decide that it will, pay them to buy some modern steamers. At the moment, it is not an economic risk for BR to invest in new ships which a Tunnel would make obsolete before they had paid their way. In the meantime, their passengers must continue to suffer the cattle-truck conditions which exist during the holiday season on the older cross-Channel steamers.

British Railways cannot be blamed for trying to conform to capitalism’s order of priority. This is common to all manner of businesses. It certainly applies to the Tunnel. The working group, after all, preferred, a Tunnel because a bridge would cost twice as much and would be less likely to bring a “reasonable economic return” while a Tunnel would “show an overall net profit.”

The Kitchen Front

One of the hottest commercial wars in this country at the moment is raging over who is going to sell the housewife a washing machine and whether she will buy it at a shop or on her doorstep.

On one side is young, brash Mr. John Bloom, who has presided over the growth of his company from a dying safety razor firm into a £9¾ million boom baby which now commands twenty-five per cent. of the home market in washing machines. Mt. Bloom has thrived on the direct selling technique, with its “cut out the middle man” line of sales talk

On the other side are the giants of the domestic electrical industry, among them Hoover Limited, a £24 million company which heads the washing machine league with 28 to 30 per cent. of the home market. Hoover’s profits are now climbing out of the relative doldrums of a few years ago, when they declined to some £5 million—this year they should be nearer £12 million. Hoover, and the other firms which deal through the retail trade, condemn direct selling as the dubious gimmick of the parvenu. Hoover are now the respectable aristocrats of the industry, although before the war they were the upstarts, whose door-to-door salesmen earned themselves a reputation for foot-in-the-door malpractices.

Not content with his slice of the English market, Mr. Bloom is now challenging Hoover’s dominance in the export field. He has already announced that he is thinking of going into the market in the United States. Rumour has it that he is due to open up in the Far East. And talks have started with the American Studebaker Corporation with the object of setting up a joint company to sell domestic appliances on the Continent.

Some time ago Rolls Razor began to include a vacuum cleaner with every washing machine they sold; two machines, they claimed, for the price of one. With the approach of winter they have replaced the “give away” cleaner with a tangential fan heater. This is a direct slap at Hoover, who only recently brought out their own fan heater, at a retail price of fourteen guineas. Mr. Bloom has said that he feels that this winter may ‘be as bad as last—with his new offer, he probably hopes that it will be as bad.

All this promises to hot up even more, with all the techniques of doubtful publicity brought into play. Whichever company wins this war, it can have little in it for the working class, reverently referred to by the admen as “the housewife” or “the consumer.”

They have, after all, gained nothing from the previous battles of this kind. And there have been enough of them; Hoover, for one, has seen off several rivals since the war. But Bloom’s Rolls Razor is the most serious threat yet. As the Sunday Telegraph put it, Mr. Bloom “. . . is no stranger to cut-throat competition.” Indeed.

News in Review: Adlai Stevenson (1965)

The News in Review column from the September 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Adlai Stevenson

If Adlai Stevenson was truly the witty and learned man he was reputed to be, he would have been appalled at the mush of vulgar cliches served up as his obituaries.

All the obituarists were agreed. Stevenson had everything but success and the tragedy of his life was that he never made the White House, because he had so many good ideas, he was so liberal, so peaceloving, that it only needed him to become President for the whole darn world to be an unrecognisably better place.

This old, drab story is the basis of many of the obsequies of men who spend their political lives in opposition and never in government. We heard the same regrets when Hugh Gaitskell died. Apparently a cruel fate is always denying us the benefits of being ruled by humane and capable men.

It should surprise nobody that the journalists never ask why the supposedly humane men never get to the top or why, if they do make it, they always cease to be humane.

The truth is simple. Capitalism requires that its administrators comply with certain priorities and if humanity is among them it is a long way from the top of the list. If a man gets power—as often happens—on a plausibly humane programme he must quickly change his ideas.

This is why Johnson’s policies have changed, and why before him Kennedy’s changed and Roosevelt’s changed. Stevenson did not have to change his for the simple reason that he never got power.

And as for that, it was not so much a case of Stevenson having admirable principles which were never applied because he did not get to the White House, as of Stevenson not getting to the White House because his policies did not match up to capitalism’s needs.

Tucked away into a comparatively unnoticed job, Stevenson could look after his dignity. He could discreetly let it be known that he had his reservations on United States policy on such issues as Cuba and Vietnam. Nothing was changed by this, nothing was even disturbed. It was all very cosy, and it allowed a cultured man to live his life in peace. It also allowed those obituaries.

An insignificant corner is the place for such reservations, and for a witty and learned man—if indeed such animals exist in politic’s jungle world.

The brave ones

One essential for a successful politician is the ability to sell the electorate the old gag “heads I win, tails you lose.” And it is clear that the Labour Party, in the midst of the financial crises of British capitalism, are learning the truth of this.

It is really quite simple. If a Minister does something which he thinks will be well received among the voters (higher pensions, lower income tax, more houses) he claims that this is entirely the result of the government’s wisdom and ability.

Heads, in other words, they win.

If, on the other hand, the government imposes measures which are going to be unpopular (higher taxes, housing cuts, higher national insurance payments) their approach is different.

These, they say, are also a result of their wisdom and ability. Much as they regret having to bring in the measures, they do it all for our benefit; somewhere in the future which we never seem to reach, we shall gain a great deal from the privations which we suffer today.

Meantime, the politicians are quick to claim another sort of credit for their unpopular measures. Such things, they say, show that whatever else they may be none can deny that they are men of courage.

Thus Mr. Wilson, on Mr. Callaghan’s Budget last April 11th:

“He told a cheering audience that it was a courageous and purposive instrument designed to strengthen Britain and to strengthen the pound.” (Daily Telegraph 12/4/65).

Thus Lord Stonham on 10th July last:

“By courageous and decisive action we have weathered the storm we inherited, and as our policies bear fruit . . .” (Guardian, 12/7/65).

In other words, although it is tails it is we, and not they, who have lost.

This kind of two-timing propaganda, thrives on the short memories and the apathy of the voters. It thrives on their forgetting, for example, that however high or low taxes may be the condition of the working class remains the same.

This condition does not depend on the day to day financial juggling of capitalism’s latest set of administrators, but on the social situation—the class position—which the working class necessarily holds in capitalist society. Whatever government is in power, and whatever they do, has no effect on this.

When the working class have grasped this fact, they will have seen through the politicians’ deceits. As a start, they might realise that when a Minister says that he is going to do something courageous it is time for the rest of us lo run for cover.

Mr. Heath takes the Tory helm

Mr. Edward Heath, the new Conservative leader, is said to be a moderniser; a strange recommendation to a party which waited until 1965 to select its leader by ballot. Heath’s reputation is largely based on his forthright debating ability, his personality appeal, which Conservatives judge to be electorally attractive, and his determined application of policies which he conceived to be in the overall interests of British Capitalism without regard to sectional interests.

Mr. Heath was at the centre of controversies such as the abolition of retail price maintenance and the British application to join the Common Market. With bad luck, Mr. Heath’s part in these two issues may well have led to his political death. As it is, Tories are now pointing to them as examples of Mr. Heath’s courage, sincerity and modern approach. In fact, being modern or old fashioned doesn’t come into it. Whatever alleged doctrinaire differences are puffed up and attributed to various personalities in Government, actual policies largely arise from the economic requirements of situations that Governments find themselves in. The practical necessity of these policy demands are made equally on both grammar school bright boys and plus-foured squiredom.

In spite of the interest centred on the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party, and in spite of the avalanche of press comment and speculation that went on, the only new thing about Mr. Heath is his face. Of course new faces have their usefulness in creating the illusion of a fresh determination to grasp fresh opportunities. They provide the renewed hopes without which capitalism would be even more intolerable. For as many faces that become jaded in the depressing aftermath of anti-climax and failure, there is always a new one to replace it. Enter Mr. Edward Heath.

To say that Mr. Heath is a flexible realist whose mind is unshackled by doctrine is another way of saying that he holds no firm political principles. Indeed he is the administrator par excellence. It is not for Mr. Heath to question the basic drives and ends of modern society. The objects of profit and private ownership are accepted without demur. He is the business organisation man in Government. At their widest, his differences with Mr. Wilson or any other reformist politician boil down to a quibble over technique of administration and even these are largely contrived for electoral considerations. As ever the watchword will be mind public opinion, but administer capitalism.

Reformist parties like the Labour and Conservative parties consider that personalities in politics are important, and in electing Mr. Heath, conservatives were concerned not only to create a bright image for the future but also to provide a means of escape from the discredited past. From this point of view, Mr. Heath seems to fulfil requirements.

It seems probable now that in accepting the leadership of the Conservative party two years ago, Sir Alec Douglas Home played a stop-gap role on the promise that he would resign “as soon as the time was right for me to go.” At that time, the claims of men like Heath and Maudling were too weak to withstand the influence of men like Butler and Quintin Hogg, especially under the existing means of appointment. Yet in spite of their prestige, both Hogg and Butler were undesirable candidates, apart from other reasons, both wore the tarnished mantle of the MacMillan era.

During Home’s stop-gap term of office, the claims of Heath and Maudling to Conservative leadership became more credible, and at the same time, Conservative M.P.’s were given the means to elect their leader by ballot. In the meantime, the political fortunes of Butler and Hogg have evaporated. Conservative M.P.’s now have the man they want.

But this is politics carried on at a trifling level that is completely removed from serious consideration of the important social problems of the time. Though they command wide interest, these paltry manoeuvrings don’t begin to touch the problems of war, poverty and frustration that arise from world capitalism. The task is to abolish capitalism, not to appoint new office boys in the running of it.

Thomson erupts

In the House of Lords on July 21st, 1965 it became apparent that Lord Thomson, who owns a lot of newspapers and who has been on television and who is a very rich man, could contain himself no longer.

It was not that he had anything irrepressibly original to say—he was actually riding a very old hobby horse which is ridden a thousand times a morning on all the Tube trains going into the City of London.

It was that mangy old nag the selfish, lazy, stupid British working man who never puts his back into it, who is always on strike (but who seems to manage to buy a car and a washing machine and a television to watch Lord Thomson on his strike pay) and who is generally no good.

“In other advanced countries,” (Lord Thomson speaking) “business is highly professional, management is completely dedicated to success. It completely dominates the lives of the executives.”

Now anyone who has ever come across an executive who is dedicated to success, and whose life is completely dominated by his work, knows what a ghastly human being Lord Thomson was praising.

Some dedicated men have considered it part of their success to support dictators and others have done their bit to make our lives that much less tolerable by replacing something beautiful like an unspoiled coastline or a rolling valley with something ugly like an atomic power station or an underwear factory.

Others have dedicated themselves to convincing us that our troubles were due to night starvation or that the only way to keep our teeth was but brushing them with chlorophyll or that nobody is switched on unless they have a tiger in their tank.

What Lord Thomson’s standard of success amounts to is a ruthless, single minded drive for profit—for the scientific, technological exploitation of human beings, organised by machines and by dedicated sociologists, psychiatrists, technicians and any clean-collared graduate who falls for the patter.

We may be excused if we insist that human life should, and can, hold more than this.

As a matter of fact Lord Thomson did drop a hint, at the end of his speech, about his idea of a successful and dedicated man:

“I greatly appreciate the actions of George Brown. I think he is trying to do something in the interests of this country and he has my complete support in every respect. I regret that some employers and some trade unions are not co-operating with him.”

Yes!

News in Review: Algerian Independence (1962)

The News in Review column from the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Algerian Independence

Before the last shots of the independence celebrations had died away, the new state of Algeria was engaged in a frontier dispute with neighbouring Morocco and the troops were being moved to and fro.

There was irony, too, in the political split between deputy prime minister Ben Bella and his nominal chief Benkhedda. One of the supremely aggravating factors in the French suppression of Algeria was the power of the occupying army, and the use which was made of it by the political and economic interests which stood for French Algeria.

Of all people, Ben Bella should have learnt a lesson from this. Yet in his power struggle he has recruited the Algerian Nationalist Army to his side and at one stage seemed about to use it in an attempted coup.

No hint was given by the Algerian nationalist leaders during the fighting that this might be the outcome of the bloodshed.

They promised much fairer times. Events have shown that Algeria will do its best to become a no nonsense capitalist state.

Now that the FLN has won, what can we look forward to?

Already, the new state is feeling its way in the international rivalries of capitalism. Mr. Ben Bella’s policy of free alignment with any country which will play along with Algeria’s economic development promises to provide one of the political divisions of the future.

It is matter of time before the Algerian workers are told that it is up to them to work harder and to make sacrifices in the interests of the people who will really own the country.

The spurious idealism and the promises of the days of the revolution will be forgotten as the new Algeria struggles to take its place among the other capitalist nations.

And sooner or later there will be another Algeria to fill the headlines with horror. At the moment the slate is almost clean, but capitalism will throw up other colonial wars. Or worse.

Beeching’s Cuts

The axe man cometh.

This year’s report from the British Transport Commission indicated where the proposed cuts in rail services are likely to fall.

The Newport to Brecon line, for instance, in South Wales. Here, said Transport Minister Marples, a statistical half-man is being carried for one hundred and seven miles by a 160 ton train—about equal to a five-ton crane lifting a bottle of beer.

“It would pay us,” he said, “to give that man a car and close the line.”

That is the yardstick which the Beeching inquiry has had to use. Not: Is it useful? but: Does it pay? Some of the Commission’s undertakings can answer yes to this question. London Transport pays. British Road Services and the docks have increased their receipts.

Only the railways—and only some parts of them at that—fail utterly to conform to capitalism’s law of existence: Does it pay?

Mr. Marples is not alone in his recognition of this law. Labour Party spokesman George Strauss said, when the House of Commons were debating the Transport Commission’s report, that the railway losses gave people the impression that what he called “publicly owned” transport was a failure.

Mr. Strauss has his definition of a failure, and of a success. The report showed, he said, that the reverse was true because all the services except the railways and the inland waterways had made a profit.

Both Tories and Labour are united in the opinion that to succeed nationalised industry must make a profit. Which means they agree that basically nationalised industries are as much a part of capitalism’s economy as any private industry is.

One fact seems to have escaped notice. Removing the rail services from many parts of the country means that those areas are being left to depend upon road transport. This means that the government are virtually creating transport monopolies all over the country.

This is hardly consistent with the Conservative doctrine of what they like to call “healthy” competition. But really capitalism is impatient of all doctrines except one.

Does it pay?

Cold Comfort

Too late for the July Socialist Standard came two noteworthy items of news. Minor in themselves, perhaps, they neatly show that the seriousness with which a person regards the housing question depends upon which end of the telescope he is rich enough to be able to view it through.

ITEM ONE: The London County Council reported that the number of homeless families in their care continues to increase and to set up new records as it does so. There are 803 such families now, involving over 3,800 people. This is the highest ever.

ITEM TWO : The Lord Mayor of Nottingham said that, on a recent visit to the Midlands Design Centre, Lord Snowdon had told him that the publicity given to the high cost of restoring Princess Margaret’s new home had not gone unnoticed. He would just as soon live in a small cottage.

To use that classical phrase: No comment.

News in Review: Crime (1963)

The News in Review column from the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

AT HOME

Crime

The continued search for the Cheddington mail robbers, enlivened by some startlingly intimate newspaper reports of the details of the crime (one paper said that the master mind is a miser who lives in Brighton) once again highlighted the fact that the working class are always on the lookout for an easy way out of the joys of their social situation.

The discovery of some of the money in hiking country around Dorking set off a Sunday afternoon equivalent of the Pools, as crowds of people combed woods and fields for what they hoped was going to be a lucky find. There was no lack of discussion about what they would all do if they came across some of the loot. Stick to it? Turn it in and claim the reward? On one thing, everyone seemed agreed. If such a piece of luck came their way, they would use it for all they were worth to help themselves get out of the working class.

Now this puts something of a perspective upon the remarks of Dr. John Mays, Lecturer in Social Science at Liverpool University, who said this about the cause of crime to a Howard League conference at Nottingham: “When they see people enjoying a better standard of living they ask why they should not have it. That leads to some of them to snatch and grab for themselves.”

Anyone who expects a Lecturer in Social Science to come up with conclusive answers to the problems which his researches uncover, may have dreamed of Dr. Mays pointing out that most crime exists only because capitalism exists. If capitalism were abolished, this crime would simply fade away into history. But the Doctor came as near to this as anyone could reasonably expect: “The nation’s business is to make a good life available for a greater number of people.”

And that is just what capitalism is failing to do. The crime figures are only one aspect of this monstrous, vital fact.

Lord Nuffield

While we are on the subject of rich men, we should comment on the death of one who became famous not just for what he owned but also for what he had given away. Capitalism, which is based upon the exploitation of the masses by the few, hypocritically teaches us to respect the man who gives away his money. Provided, that is, it is all done in a way of which capitalism can approve. Such a man was Lord Nuffield, whose bequests to charities and the like were variously estimated at his death at between sixteen and forty million pounds.

The press flew into action when their hero died, with long obituaries telling us how generous he was, how grateful we should be for his open-handedness, how sad it was that he should go the way of all flesh. None of them, in the thousands of words they spewed out, asked, the obvious question.

Where did the millions which Nuffiekl gave away come from, in the first place?

And, equally, none of them gave the only tenable answer:

From the exploitation of the workers in his factories.

Diet on the dole

Evidence of what the good life means to many people has come from County Durham, where the West Hartlepools Council has devised a diet to feed a family of four or five pounds a week. West Hartlepools has three thousand people out of work at the moment and, if the economic portents are being read correctly, can expect a lot more as the winter draws on. It is also the place, as we recorded last month, where Cerebos Ltd. panned to dump a hundred tons of meat and fish paste into the sea because they are changing the shapes of their jars.

There were no reports of the West Hartlepoals unemployed, nor of their long suffering wives, protesting at the insult which has been added to their injury. There were only photographs of patient, if bemused, housewives at the demonstration of the diet. It has not, apparently, occurred to anyone that there is something insulting in supporting a social system which cannot secure even a meagre livelihood for its productive members, and then lecturing them, when times are hard, on the techniques of living on short rations.

Are the working class too buffeted, too loaded with the degradations and the insults of capitalism to care? Perhaps they are. On the very same week as the diet was being demonstrated in West Hartlepools the Sunday Telegraph reported that Minister of Labour Mr. John Hare would soon be able to wrestle with the problem of the unemployed in a new home in Holland Park. He, poor fellow, has been driven from his former home in Sussex Place, Regents Park, by an expiring lease. Never mind. The new Hare home, after one or two alterations, will be worth over £100,000. Mr. Hare is married to a sister of “immensely rich” Lord Cowdray.

Perhaps the unemployed in the Hartlepools do not read the Sunday Telegraph. Nor, perhaps, its sister paper the Daily Telegraph, which told us a few days later about some of the people who will never have to worry about their food budget because to all intents and purposes, they own, among other things, Scotland (which after all is not very far from County Durham). Here are just a few of the owners:

The Duke of Buccleuch, 500,000 acres.

The Duke of Sutherland. 250,000 acres.

Cameron of Lochiel, 150,000 acres.

Col. David Greig, 90,000 acres.

The Scientists

Answers were hard to find, too, at this year’s meeting of the British Association. All sorts of problems are aired at this annual orgy of scientific speechifying but, apart from technical matters, it is virtually impossible to find, among the thousands of words, a hint of the solution to society’s ailments. The scientists can pose the question very nicely, usually with a mass of supporting evidence. But the answer? That is a different matter.

Here, for example, is Professor C. F. Carter, Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University, worrying about the problem of economic growth:

“Britain is showing increasing signs of tiredness not only in government but in the Civil Service and in some parts of industry, and it badly needs the energy of a fresh generation . . . Britain could have a five per cent growth rate if people worked harder and longer but people would not work hard to create material wealth unless it was considered desirable and respectable to enjoy the fruits of their labour.”

And here is the Professor’s solution to the problem he has stated:

“The economic system must be organised with reasonable efficiency and honesty. The vigour of new ideas must not be suffocated by a dead weight of orthodoxy and the energy of the young must not be frustrated by the power of the old.”

It is difficult to believe that Professor Carter—and perhaps some of his audience—are unaware of the fact that there is nothing new about his suggestion. They must surely have noticed that, whether young people or old are in charge of capitalism, the anomalies, the frustrations and the inhumanities of the system remain untouched. There is, further, nothing especially unorthodox in suggesting that the younger element be given their chance. Nor anything especially hopeful or inspiring. Is this the best that the scientists can offer us? Apparently so.

The tragedy about scientists, in fact, is that they never seem able to hit on the real solution to capitalism’s problems. With all their training—some of it training in how to think straight, how to assess evidence and to reach a defensible conclusion—they never seem to grasp one of the most obvious facts of present day society. Very, very few of them ever consider the idea that there may be something in the basic nature of capitalism which is always going to prevent it from settling its own difficulties.

Scientists, in other words, are just as ready as any of the great unscientific mass outside their conference hall to support capitalism, with all its anomalies and illogicalities. They turn not a hair at helping to make the devilish devices with which rival nations fight their wars. They are always on hand to look into, and to try to control, any of capitalism’s problems. This year’s British Association learned that Professor R. V. Jones, professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen University, will soon be joining the Ministry of Defence to advise on scientific matters. To advise, in other words, on the scientific aspects of the war effort of British capitalism. Professor Jones himself said that it was “a little unfortunate ” that the news of his appointment had leaked out at a meeting of the Association. It is even more unfortunate for the human race that long training and extensive knowledge should be diverted into the modern war machines instead of being applied to the benefit of society.

ABROAD

Civil Rights March

The Civil Rights demonstration in Washington was, in terms of its numbers alone, massively successful. But it was no more than that.

The Negroes in the United States, just like all other oppressed racial groups everywhere else, are discriminated against because of the false ideas of those who do the discriminating. In some ways, capitalism needs an ignorant working class—and these are the very people who will try to explain away the system’s shortcomings by venting their spleen on the Jew, or the Negro or some other Minority group. At times, a government will actually foster such ideas—in wartime, for example, it helps to have a working class who think that the other side is inherently bestial and possesses inferior fighting abilities.

This kind of ignorance cannot be cleared out by demonstrations, however massive they may be. Capitalism thrives on ignorance of one sort or another; the only people who are immune to racial theories are those who have realised that the private property system is not in their interests and who work for its abolition.

South Africa & Nyasaland

Not only race theories, but race lunacy, in South Africa, where the dour censorship of the Nationalist government often makes them look foolish. The latest victim of the Pretoria blue pencil is the Peter Sellers film Heavens Above, which is in trouble in the Republic because it shows, among other scenes, the white vicar taking tea with his Negro churchwarden, the same churchwarden at the font at the christening of a white baby, helping the vicar off with his coat, and so on.

It is tempting to say: “How stupid can you get?” and to leave it at that. But, of course, the vicious race oppression in South Africa deserves more comment. For that is the country where racial theories are actually holding back the very advance of capitalist society, where the economically powerful industrialists find that their hopes are so often frustrated by the Nationalist government’s primitive ideas and fears of black revolution. In some ways, it is a deeply frightening spectacle. The immediate outlook for South Africa is not happy. It is dark with the promise of savage conflict, with little hope for humanity and reason in it.

It is small relief to turn from lunatic South Africa to some of the countries where the Negro nationalists have come to power. Ghana, as we all know, is a classic example of an intolerant government. Everybody can remember the self destructive anarchy of the early days of independence in the Belgian Congo. In other parts of Africa, too, the erstwhile fighters for independence have shown that, when they are in power, their followers would be wise to forget the more purple passages in the speeches they made in the old days of struggle.

Dr. Banda, who suffered imprisonment for his advocacy of independence for Nyasaland, is a man who must be trying to do a lot of forgetting. In his case, the usual strictures upon the people of the country to work harder, to serve diligently the cause of Nyasaland’s aspirant capitalist class and to become, in other words, meek, respectable citizens, has been accompanied by an attempt to impose a degree of public adulation which is as ridiculous as any of the antics of the censors in Pretoria.

When he is out and about, Dr. Banda likes to have the road to himself. That is why the Nyasaland Legislative Assembly has recently been debating a Bill which will compel motorists and cyclists to pull up at the side of the road when Banda’s convoy approaches. Is this not ludicrously reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin with his globe and his microphones in The Great Dictator? There is only one comment which fills the bill. We shall give way to the temptation which earlier we resisted. How stupid can you get?

BUSINESS

Whistling in the dark

One of the lively minds who, the ads. tell us, write The Guardian, has found something in the world of business to be cheerful about. “Optimism,” said the papers City column on August 27th, “Is in the air . . . most people appear to take the view that the way lies reasonably clear ahead for the next six months at least.”

In some sections of industry and commerce, this is at least partly true. The shipbuilders report a brighter outlook, estimating that by the end of this year their orders will be over the million ton mark, compared to 610,000 tons for last year. The Guardian’s conclusion, as we might have expected, was that this is all due to the measures in last April’s Budget and to the other financial juggling which the government has since tried, such as the £60 million loan scheme for the shipbuilding industry.

But there is another side to the picture. Other industries are not doing so well. On the same day—indeed, on the same page—-as The Guardian was carolling its optimism abroad, it reported that The Metal Box Company is worried about the lack of orders and finds that the tax “incentives” have had little effect upon its markets, Still on the same page, Rael Brook, the shirt company which rose so dramatically a few years ago, was also said to be on harder times; its current dividend has taken a cut by half, mainly as a result of an unsuccessful venture into the production of trousers. Among the other firms which are suffering from a pronounced lack of optimism are Metal Industries (predicting lower profits for this year) and John Brown, the shipbuilders (profits expected to be “clearly not … as great for the next two years”).

Only a few days later The Guardian sobered its cheerfulness with the news that the long forecast upsurge in consumer spending has not come to pass and that the retail sale figures for July were well short of the hopes which had been held out for them. And July, let us not forget, was the month when the tax adjustments of the last Budget were supposed to be flooding the working class with excessive spending power. The Guardian hesitated not at turning the necessary somersault:

“This is sad news for the optimists— including Mr. Maudling—who have been scanning the figures eagerly each month for signs of the genuine recovery that they felt was on the way.”

Now if this makes it seem as if The Guardian does not know its own mind on the subject of the business of British capitalism, we do not have to look very far for the reason : “Just why consumers generally are still holding off from spending more freely is anyone’s guess.”‘ (Sept. 3rd) and: “But no one can say for sure what sort of time lag we must expect before the next investment boom gets under way.” (August 27th).

The point is that the men in the Treasury—and those who write clever articles about them in the newspaper—claim that they can do better than guess about the economy. They should be sure about investment booms. It is illogical, to put it mildly, to support capitalism in one breath and in the next to admit that it is an uncontrollable system of guesses and uncertainties. And, in these circumstances, it is even worse to take up talk about “optimism” when we know that capitalism’s anarchies can abruptly and ruthlessly make a mockery of the most confident of whistling in the dark.

BEA's hidden profits

British European Airways has announced that it has cut its previous year’s loss from £1.5 million to £265,000. At the same time, BEA pointed out how generous a deal its shareholders have got from the nationalised industry. The loss was reached after—and not before, as is the case with private industry—BEA had paid out £3,081,521 in interest on capital. In other words, BEA’s actual profit last year was £2,816,220. Which shows up for the nonsense it is the talk about a nationalised industry being an automatic money loser.

BEA’s profit came, just like any other, from the work of the people whom it employs. Pilots and air hostesses, and the ground crews with their baseball caps, may seem glamorous beings to their earthbound fellows. Yet they are all exploited because that is what capitalism sees is done to all its workers, on land, sea and in the air.

It is, incidentally, worth noting the order in which BEA, in sound, traditional capitalist manner, put human welfare and its own commercial interests. At the Press Conference to introduce the Corporation’s report, chairman Lord Douglas of Kirtleside was asked for his views on the Noise Abatement Society’s proposal to reduce the offensiveness of London Airport by moving it to Foulness Island in the Thames Estuary.

Lord Douglas is famous for not mincing his words.

“Bloody crazy,” he replied.

News in Review: Berlin again (1962)

The News in Review column from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Berlin again

Berlin seems to be developing into one of capitalism’s nastier perennials.

With each year’s squabbles over the divided city — some of the more minor ones being prime examples of the ridiculous lengths to which capitalist powers go in the risky game of international tit-for-tat–the Russians advance their cause in Germany a little further.

Last year’s wall, a temporary-seeming structure then, is now solider and more permanent. The East German police range their guns along it. This year the Russians have withdrawn their commandant in East Berlin, leaving the Western powers to negotiate with the civilian administration there, or else with nobody.

In retaliation the Western powers have forced the Russians to use a more direct route when taking the guard to their war memorial which stands in West Berlin.

This petty and undignified bickering is only the detail of a more serious situation.

The Soviet object, it seems, is to force the Western powers to acknowledge that Berlin — and indeed Germany — is permanently divided. (Permanently, that is, until another European war draws out the frontiers again, creating new zones of dispute and tension.) If they can do this, the Russians will have won a new foothold in Europe and another buffer state will be between her and any threat of a re-emergent German capitalism.

There was a lot of indignant sob-stuff in the press about Peter Fechter, the 18 year old who was shot down by the East Berlin police and left by them to bleed to death beneath the Wall.

None of the papers recalled that when Fechter was born they were all busily telling us that it was heroic and laudable to kill Germans. At that time the Allied air offensive against Germany was at its height; the persistent bombers killed thousands of Germans quite indiscriminately. It was not their fault that the infant Fechter survived, to die so horribly later.

Berlin is typical of capitalism’s international rivalries. It is fought out over apparently minor details. But its potential is frighteningly dangerous.

And it is all sustained by cynical lies.

Chinese Bomb

Although they were quick to retract it, the statement from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington that China would be able to set off a nuclear explosion in a few months was enough to send a shiver down our spines.

More bombs. More tests. More fallout. More suffering. More death.

That is the immediate prospect. For the longer run, China’s bomb will mean a fiercer arms race and an increase in the tension in any dispute between her and the other great powers. And perhaps in the end a bigger and more destructive war.

China, like any aspirant capitalist power, has long been determined to make nuclear weapons. And, just like the others, she will excuse them with any sort of lying propaganda.

Last year, the general manager of Reuters persuaded the Chinese Foreign Secretary to talk on this subject. Marshall Chen Yi said that China’s having the bomb would actually decrease the chance of a war, because when only a few powers had it they were more tempted to throw their weight about.

We may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, for it is the very reverse of the deterrent theory which the nuclear powers now use to justify their having the bomb. These countries have always claimed that what stops a war is the fact that they have an almost exclusive possession of the biggest of all sticks.

Who should we believe in this? London, Washington and Moscow? Or Peking? In fact, nobody need worry about the answer to that question.

For what will China do when she has got the bomb? Will she follow the logic of Chen Yi’s argument and give the secret to the world? To India, for example? To Japan? If all the other nuclear powers are anything to go by China will forget her big-talk and keep her secrets to herself.

And perhaps we may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, too.

Capitalism will always have its ghastly weapons and it will always have its paid liars to excuse them. While they are spinning their lies the weapons get bigger and more horrifying and the conflicts grow more agonising.

Still feel like smiling?

Farnborough

Apart from the little-boy excitements of the machines themselves, what was the interesting and significant thing about this year’s Air Show at Farnborough?

Not so long ago it was a popular working-class idea that the aircraft industry was bound to expand into the future and that nobody who made his career in it could fail. This was the reason for many workers—among them graduates from universities—taking jobs with the aeroplane manufacturers.

But like many working-class assumptions, this one took no account of the nature of the beast called capitalism.

There were no turbo-prop aircraft on show this year. Yet the British aircraft industry once calculated that these would be more economical to run than the big jets and would therefore sell better to the airlines which, for all their superficial glamour, must have a sordid capitalist interest in cheap operating costs. Boeing, Douglas and Sud-Aviation in France proved this calculation wrong. So the turbo-prop is a dead-end and all the money tied up in it has gone down the drain. BOAC has its last Britannias up for sale for next to nothing.

Now the British industry is gambling on the future success of the VC10 and the de Havilland Trident. For neither of these are the prospects golden. If the fears which are expressed for them come to reality there will probably be another big cut-back in the aircraft industry and a lot more of its workers unemployed.

The airlines, too, are facing their problems. To stay in the race, each of them is forced to buy the latest, biggest, fastest (which usually also means the noisiest) machines on offer. The result up to now is that the number of seats available far exceeds the passengers who want them. So there is fierce competition, especially on the Trans-Atlantic runs.

This has caused most airlines in the world to fail to make a profit. Last month BEA one of the few profitable lines up to the present—announced that interest payments had turned a working profit of £550,000 into a loss of a million and a half pounds.

We all know what capitalism says must happen to an industry which does not make a profit. Aircraft are something of a special case; there are elements of national prestige and strategy to take into account. But in the end, in one way or another, the rule will apply.

For a lot of aircraft workers it looks like being a very bumpy ride.

Fasten your safety belts, please.

Nkrumah strikes

Doctor Nkrumah has succeeded in battling many people with his latest round of deportations and imprisonments.

It is simple enough to discern the reason for his expelling the Bishops Roseveare and Patterson. Both of them were involved in criticising the Young Pioneers, a nationalistic youth organisation whose members are required to chant, among other nonsense, that “Nkrumah never dies.”

Nobody who knows anything about Ghana under Nkrumah expected the Bishops to get away with suggesting that in the country’s youngsters should spend less time in worshipping the god in Accra and more in the (equally futile) worship of the god who they say is in a place called heaven.

But it is harder to explain the detention of Mr. Adamafio, Mr. Cofie Crabbe and Mr. Ako Adjei. The first two of these men were up to the hilt in Nkrumah’s campaign against the churches. We might have thought them safe in their jobs.

Perhaps they were involved in the bomb-throwing which has been going on in Ghana of late. Or perhaps they were just becoming too great rivals to Nkrumah’s supremacy.

Now they have gone and Krobo Edusei, famous for his wife’s £3,000 bed, is back in the government after his dismissal six months ago. Nkrumah, already overloaded with jobs (among others, he controls the Convention People’s Party, the Ghana Civil Service and the Volta Dam project) has taken on the Foreign Secretaryship.

These moves may be difficult to explain to our entire satisfaction, but one or two things can be said for sure.

Nkrumah is a dictator. His Young Pioneers are a copy, albeit a weak one, of the Hitler Youth movement. In taking on totalitarian powers, Nkrumah has betrayed the promises he made when he was fighting the British for Ghana’s independence.

There is nothing new in this. Postwar history is full of examples of nationalist dictators who ousted their country’s occupiers and came to power themselves with slogans of eternal liberty.

Many people outside Ghana were taken in by Nkrumah’s propaganda in the old days. Shocked though they may now be, they still lend their ears to the nationalists who are currently banging the independence drum.

Let Nkrumah’s Ghana stand as a warning that national independence has nothing to offer the ordinary people who are misled into supporting it and who end up by being oppressed and exploited by it.

Dr. Soblen

The death of Doctor Soblen brought to a close another of capitalism’s nasty little episodes.

Soblen killed himelf because, above everything else, he did not want to go back to the United States to serve his sentence for spying for Russia. The British government, perhaps at the insistence of Washington, were determined that he should be sent back. To get their way, they were prepared to break some of the legalities which at other times they hypocritically defend.

Great Britain has signed a treaty of extradition with, among others, the United States. This treaty means that if, say, a murderer escapes to America the government there will catch him and end him to this country for trial.

This treaty expressly excludes spies. The reasons are obvious, all countries have their network of espionage and it would be embarrassing for all of them if, should one of their agents flee, he could be extradited by the country he had been spying on.

Soblen should have been covered by this provision; in a sense, he was. The government never fought his case on the grounds that he was to be extradited. They only insisted that he should be deported.

But deportation only means that a person is sent out of a country—it does not mean that he must be sent to any particular other country. He can choose, in fact, the frontier by which he leaves, if Soblen had been deported he might have chosen to go to one of the Iron Curtain countries where, no doubt, he would have been welcomed as a hero.

The government were, of course, aware of this. In the name of the Anglo-American alliance they ignored the laws which they themselves have made to make their system run more smoothly.

Soblen was a tragic dupe to the illusion that Russian capitalism is worth working and dying for. This does not obscure the fact that he was a victim of the callous cynicism which all capitalist powers—including Russia fall back on when it suits them.

South Africa

At the time of the Sharpeville shootings and the “Boycott South African” campaign many anti-apartheid spokesmen went to great lengths to show how South Africa’s economy would suffer as a result of world opinion and moral indignation.

Up to the present the owners of the means of life in South Africa are no more or less affected by trials and tribulations than their brothers in less race-prejudiced countries. In fact, some foreign industrialists think the place has some attraction?.

Textile chief Mr. Cyril Lord intends to move the contents of two cotton mills from Lancashire to the Bantu areas of the Union. He says the British Government has failed to protect textile interests against cheap Asian competition. Some 100 key men are offered jobs abroad; the rest face the sack.

A South African official in London said: “Mr. Lord will have the advantages of cheap labour among others.” (Daily Herald, September 12th, 1962.)

Will Mr. Lord continue to demand that the British Government protect their textile interests by keeping out his cheap South African cotton goods? Boycotters and “Ban this and that” mongers may note that, while workers may be threatened with ills such as unemployment, propertied groups do not suffer economically, even though they sanction or commit acts which are quite anti-social.

News in Review: Los Angeles erupts (1965)

The News in Review column from the October 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Los Angeles erupts

For a few days the spotlight was switched from the ever present horror of Vietnam and focussed on the United States itself.

Los Angeles, that most modern of cities—if such an outdated word as city can be used to describe a sprawl of over 452 square miles—erupted into violence. In an orgy of looting, arson and killing the Negro population, so often the victims of mob violence, themselves became the mob. The savage details were too well reported to need repeating, but many thousands of troops were needed to crush what amounted to a rebellion. When it was over, needless to say the Negroes were the worst-hit victims.

The suppression of the Negro, lasting for a hundred years after their “liberation,” ranging from murder to petty discrimination, and running through all strata of society, has produced a distrust and hatred that will take a very long time to overcome. At every moment and in every possible way, the Negro is made to feel inferior.

Such a situation, and the fact that it could be changed, must lead to an explosion. Los Angeles has been a modern legend, that personifies the so-called affluent society, the world of mass-produced commodities in profusion. Brash and ugly, a mass of sprawling suburbs and six-lane freeways where public transport has practically disappeared, the Watts-Willowbrook area where the explosion occurred is known as the Black Ghetto. Can anything illustrate the plight of the American Negro more than the use of this medieval word to describe the conditions of workers in an ultra-modern city?

The riot was crushed, but as long as hatred between workers remains on such a scale and is added to the normal tensions and frustrations of capitalism, such eruptions will continue.

Priorities in Kashmir

How cruelly does capitalism itself expose the innocent delusions of its own supporters !

Consider the case of the host of organisations which collect charity with the professed object of lightening the enormous burden of hunger and destitution in the world.

These charities have an extensive library of photographs of pitiful children, swollen-bellied near skeletons. They campaign with pictures of refugees and victims of natural disasters. Many people find this appeal irresistible, and the money flows in.

India and Pakistan are among the favourite subjects for this sort of charity; both countries have literally millions of starving people, and the problem is periodically intensified by famine and calamities like floods and cyclones.

Yet among the indescribable suffering of their peoples, India and Pakistan can afford to go to war. What does this make of the appeal of the charities?

A few months ago these same two countries were fighting over the Rann of Kutch. While this was going on a cyclone hit East Pakistan, killing thousands of people and making millions homeless. The Pakistani Forces could have been used for rescue and recovery work; they had the manpower and much of the needed equipment. But they could not be spared from the fighting.

This sort of inconsistency does not prevent the charity-mongers appealing for aid for India and Pakistan. What they overlook is that over the past few years aid has been pumped into those countries on a scale which mocks the charities’ wildest dreams.

According to India’s Information Minister, Mrs. Gandhi, Pakistan has received one and a half billion dollars worth of aid from the United States. Mrs. Gandhi also admitted to India having received “only” two million dollars’ worth, but, of course, she did not mention the other aid, open and disguised, which her country has had from the other side in the Cold War.

The point is that the aid was not meant to feed starving people. It went into the two countries’ military machines; Mrs. Gandhi has complained—and she may be right — that American equipment which was supposed to be directed against the Russians was in action in Kashmir.

The Indo-Pakistani conflict has highlighted one of capitalist’s most blatant scandals. It defies all reason, all sense, all humanity, for the world to pour its resources into a massive destructive effort when there is so much to do in the way of feeding and protecting the human race.

This will not be altered as long as capitalism lasts. The war in Kashmir was only the latest example of capitalism’s priorities, which have always counted human interests and comforts as of little importance.

To capitalism it is in the natural order of things that millions should starve and that a battle should rage all about them.

TUC through the hoop

What were trade unionists expected to make of this year’s TUC, when its General Secretary one day argues in favour of a certain policy and the very next day describes that same policy as a “shabby compromise”?

Confusion is inevitable. The connections between the unions and the Labour Party were once supposed to benefit the unions, but they are being used against them.

It is now possible, for example, for a Minister of Labour to use his speech as a fraternal delegate to declare that the time has come for the unions to accept legal restrictions on their freedom to negotiate. It is possible for General Secretary George Woodcock disconsolately to argue in favour of his “shabby compromise,” of forcing individual unions to refer their wage claims to the TUC for vetting, because this was their only hope of avoiding legislation to force them to refer their claims to a Government board.

The unions still seem determined to support the Labour Government, although its professed policy is, as Woodcock put it, to “. . . put some restraint on the growth of incomes”—a policy which Minister of Labour Gunter justified because without it “We shall fail to hold our place in a fiercely competitive world.”

The Labour Government is, in other words, rallying the TUC in support of its efforts to salvage the international trade of the British capitalist class. This was also the aim of past Conservative Governments, but they were never able to persuade the unions to jump through the hoop so easily. It is worthwhile to ponder how the TUC, and the Labour Party, would have reacted had it been a Tory Government which was threatening to take legal powers to restrain wage claims.

How Mr. Wilson would have thundered his denunciations of dictatorship from the grouse moors! What depths of cliché-ridden oratory Mr. Gunter would have reached! What a riotous assembly this year’s TUC would have been!

But it is a Labour Government which is now moving towards a clash with the unions. These regular, hysterical denunciations of strikes and wage claims are coming from the mouths of Labour Ministers. And this policy—much tougher than the Tories ever tried—is justified with the last-ditch argument that whatever a Labour Government may do they are better than the Conservatives. This argument, which, in fact, allows the Government to get away with anything, is of course quite unsupported by any evidence.

But it is an argument which we are probably going to hear a lot more of Woodcock himself said that prices and incomes have actually gone up more since the Labour Government started trying to keep them down than they did before.

The unions may be like David Low’s famous carthorse—slow, patient, even a little stupid. But they have thrown a few riders in the past and they will do so again.

Recession ?

The Labour Government are going one better than keeping their election promises by claiming that they are giving us something which was not in their programme last October.

They did not promise that within a year of their winning the election we would be in an economic recession, with many industries on short time and the prospect of more to come.

Some of the firms on short time—for example, Ford and Hoover—as well as many City Editors, blamed the recession on to Government policy. While this may be a convenient explanation, it ignores certain facts of capitalist life.

Slumps, like booms, happen when conditions are ripe for them. A big boom overrides any attempt at official control and a slump does not respond to Governmental efforts at revival.

Juggling with interest rates and restricting credit are not policies which fashion events, but largely reactions to those events. British capitalism is not alone in its present difficulties; many other countries are also experiencing them, which indicates that the recession may get deeper yet.

But if we accept the Government’s claim that the closing down of the economy is all their own work, there is a massively awkward question for them to answer.

What happens, in a slump, to their vision of an automated Britain? They came to power on a promise to build a British industry humming with the very latest and most expensive computers and automatic production equipment.

They spoke (in fact they still speak) of a Britain in the forefront of the technological age, driving for its markets under the impetus of massive investment and a fearless determination to innovate.

But in a time of recession industry is definitely not interested in investing in expensive equipment designed to make more of the very things which, because of the slump, cannot be sold. At such times industry is not inclined to innovate; it tends to pull in its horns and to wait for the danger to pass.

Wilson’s Britain of scientists and technologists was, in fact, one of Labour’s more horrible ideas. There need be no regrets that it has joined the long list of pledges, given solemnly but now forgotten, knowing no grave but their own inconsistency.

Things to come

Time, as they never tire of telling us, marches on.

The first men to fly were famous for their daring; the aeroplane was a glamorous marvel of the Edwardian age.

But the First World War showed that the sky was a battlefield, into which each side sent its balloons and aircraft to observe the enemy and to direct artillery fire.

It was not long before other aircraft were developed, to shoot down the observers. Then others were sent up to protect the balloons from attack and later came the fighters and the bombing ‘plane to improve on the artillery shell.

This was the birth of the military aeroplane. The sky is now becoming outdated as a battlefield; the daring young men of the future will probably fight it out in space.

The two Cosmic powers—Russia and the United States—now make no secret of the uses to which their space ventures are being put. Both countries admit that they have observer satellites aloft and America plans to send up a space laboratory to carry out experiments in what they call defence.

The nature of these experiments is not, of course, known but it seems that we are witnessing the opening of another battlefield.

The next step could be a space ship designed to knock out the observer satellites, then another to prevent them being attacked—and then perhaps dog-fights in space.

There is nothing fanciful in this. The military possibilities of space flights have always been obvious and there was never any cause to believe that they would be ignored in capitalism’s constant arms race.

This may rub some of the glamour off the astronauts, which will not be recovered by blatant propaganda dodges like President Johnson’s proposal to send them on world-wide goodwill tours. There is no goodwill in planning to destroy millions of people.

Space war adds another dimension to capitalism’s terrors. It is not a pleasant prospect, but nobody should be surprised that once again society’s resources, and the courage and skill of its people, are being perverted.

News in Review: Algeria (1962)

The News in Review column from the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Algeria

In Algeria and in France the blood still flows.

The shootings, the bombings, the threats—even the publicity-worthy attempt, by the OAS to extort money from Brigitte Bardot—are typical of a bitter struggle between nationalists and colonialists.

Recent events have been bad enough. But according to some correspondents they are only the lull before another terrible storm breaks over Algeria.

What has happened to de Gaulle, the strong man who was going to clear up this mess? Whatever local influence the French President has had on the struggle—and there is no denying that he has had some—he is pretty well powerless to resolve the basic dispute.

The Moslems are still adamantly for an Algerian Algeria. The settlers stand firm for French control of the country.

Post-war history has been notable for its bloody nationalist struggles as the colonial powers have been pushed out of country after country, not always going without a fight.

This is what can be expected when capitalism throws up its disputes over property and the right to exploit a country’s workers.

That is basically what the trouble in Algeria is about. Within capitalism such struggles must go on.

Weak politicians can certainly do nothing about this. Strong politicians may make a show of doing something but end up no better than the rest.

Pay Pause

There was, of course, much moaning in the House when they got the news that the pay pause had been defied by the award to the electricity workers.

No moaning in the power stations, though. The workers were bound to resist the pause, because it is a threat to their living standards. That is what drove the teachers to demonstrate and what may cause the civil servants to start working to rule.

For the workers, then, it is simply a matter of fighting for their interests.

And for the employers?

For some of them the pay pause was a welcome thing. But for others it was not so simple.

Some weeks before the electricity award many private employers in the road haulage industry had chosen to ignore the Minister of Labour’s ruling that a pay increase and a cut in hours could not operate until the first of this month. The employees of these firms got their rise and reduction in hours in the middle of last November.

Why did the road haulage firms give in? Simply, they reckoned up the cost of surrender. Then they balanced it against the cost of the strikes and other protests which would follow a postponement of the rise. They found that capitulation was the cheaper course. So they paid up.

Which goes to show how capitalism’s divided interests extend to the employers themselves and often defeat the capitalists’ own ends.

Scooter Slump

One by one, the never-had-it-so-good industries are feeling the unaccustomed draught of recession.

Cars, television sets and refrigerators have already had their slumps. Now a side-show industry in the post war consumer goods boom has taken a fall.

Scooters and mopeds took their share of the boom, winning a lot of young people away from the bicycles they used to pedal around. Like the rest, they had their glorious summer in 1958 when the H.P. controls were off and everything sold like hot cakes.

This was the time when Raleigh Industries, already famous for their pedal cycles came in to try to take their share of the scooter and moped market.

Since then times have become hard. Lambretta recently had to cut their prices drastically in answer to their competitors’ reductions. Now Raleigh, who have already suffered in the slump in bicycle’ sales have announced that in March they will close their factory at Smethwick which turns out their scooters and mopeds. Fifteen hundred people will probably lose their jobs.

Perhaps this only amounts to a recession from which the stricken industries will soon recover. But there are enough of them in trouble now to cause fear that it is more serious than that.

Capitalism is still a system of ups and downs. Its spells of relative prosperity cannot have any permanent value. Workers should not wait until they are on the dole queue before they learn the truth of this.

Lib-Lab?

It is early days yet for the Labour Party seriously to consider an alliance with the Liberals. Mr. Gaitskell still has enough hope of becoming Prime Minister in his own right to explain his description of Mr. Woodrow Wyatt’s suggestion of a Lib.-Lab. link-up as “silly.”

It is safe to assume, though, that the suggestion finds rather more favour among the Labour Party members who arc getting sick of being on the losing side. If the Tories give them one or two more drubbings at the polls, anything could happen.

Nothing new in this, of course. The Labour governments of 1924 and 1929 blamed their alliance with the Liberals for their failure to run capitalism. They swore that they would never again allow their hands to be so tied.

But having the 1945 government to themselves made no difference—the Labour Party failed again. The best that some of them can now suggest is to revive the idea of a Liberal alliance— which they themselves told us was discredited by the events of 1924 and 1929.

There is nothing surprising in this. The Labour Party do not exist to propound political principles. Like any other capitalist party, they are out first of all for power.

This goes for the Liberals as well. They have made it plain that they would only consider an alliance which was worth their while in terms of Members of Parliament.

All good, clean, cynical fun this. May we be excused if we do not see anything to laugh at?