Greasy Pole: European Union? Civil War? (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have Your Say was the advice we were bombarded with from both sides in the European Referendum. Meanwhile the argument which raged between the factions Remain and Leave was not just between the main parties; in the case of the Tories the internal rift was sufficiently bitter to be dubbed a ‘civil war’. There was no concealing the fact that the conflict was central to the competing ambitions of Cameron and Boris Johnson, with the prize being Number Ten Downing Street. In a TV clash between a group of Front Bench MPs, Labour’s Angela Eagle blasted Johnson that his group’s campaign bus was touring the country flying a slogan that membership of the EU involved a British payment of £350 million a week, although a clutch of financial experts were definite that this figure was an exaggeration. So Johnson should ensure, Eagle raged, that it was removed from the streets. Another participant helpfully suggested that the figures Number Ten, illustrating Johnson’s inflating ambition, should be on the bus in place of that £350 million. Johnson’s response was to slip his hand into his breast pocket.

John Major

At the same time Cameron condemned the Tory Brexit argument about the cost of EU membership as ‘…perpetuating an economic con-trick on the British people’, part of an intention to be ‘reckless and undemocratic in failing to outline an economic plan for Britain outside of the EU’. On the matter of tricking the voters, Cameron should be reminded that from the security of his personal wealth he has led a government which will go down in history for its policies of depressing the living standards of masses of desperately impoverished people – a reality which justified a Eurosceptic MP in his party describing his latest move as ‘crass’ and ‘a slap in the face’. A similarly gruesome incident in the civil war was when ex-Prime Minister John Major, who occasionally appears in public exuding a sleek self-satisfaction, sneered at Johnson as a ‘court jester’ who was running a campaign which in its false claims about the levels of immigration was ‘squalid… deceitful… depressing’ - adjectives which could well  have been applied in relation to the policies of the Thatcher government of which Major was so prominent a member that Thatcher favoured him  as her most favoured successor.

Meanwhile there was no need for concern about Boris Johnson’s ability to defend himself in the Brexit trenches. On one of the main matters of the Referendum he warned that David Cameron ‘…can’t be trusted on immigration’ and that his regular promises to cut immigration were ‘deeply corrosive of popular trust in democracy’. This attack on Cameron would have been more impressive if Johnson had been able to support it with an explanation of why, and how, he had so recently been so firm a supporter of him from the vantage point of his Mayoralty of London and as a Member of Parliament.

Erotica

Among the less publicised supporters of Leave was Andrew Rosindell, the Tory MP for Romford. This is a seat he first took in the 2001 election – one of the few to be won back after the 1997 Labour landslide. Part of his campaign then was to parade Spike, a Staffordshire bull terrier, wrapped up in a Union Jack. During the next three elections, with the help of Spike, he increased his majority. Rosindell is one of Parliament’s natural Right Wingers. Among other things he was a member of the Monday Club, until Iain Duncan Smith forced him to resign; he is a supporter of the death penalty;  he  expressed  ‘huge admiration’ for President Pinochet;  in 2015 he introduced a Ten Minute Bill aimed at enforcing control over British borders with the European Union. A less publicised feature of the career of this ‘flag fanatic and super patriot’ was in 2010 when he sponsored a fund-raising dinner at the House of Commons  for what was known as Erotica House – an ‘adult entertainment show’ – followed by a dinner when it was obligatory to wear ‘kinky fancy dress’ (it is not known  whether this requirement extended to any of Spike’s friends). Erotica Ltd is based in Romford and is owned by one of Mr Rosindell’s wealthy supporters.

Michael Gove

Less arousing than Rosindell and his dog was Michael Gove, Minister of Justice, one-time close friend and neighbour of Cameron, who took a key role in spouting the case for leaving the EU, spiced with some typical Gove phrases. For example, he condemned Cameron and his supporters for ‘scaremongering’, of treating the British people like ‘…mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night’. Gove has had a varied career; there was a time when he might have been within reach of the party leadership but a very public clash with Theresa May caused him to be pushed down the Greasy Pole until his promotion to the Justice Ministry, which led to him becoming one of Boris Johnson’s leading supporters in Leave. He was so keen on this that he was encouraged to reveal that he came from a family of North Sea fishermen, with all that implies by way of hard work in tough conditions. In response a leader of the Labour Party Remain group, Alan Johnson, blasted Gove’s speech as ‘bluster’, part of his need to ‘…wish away reality but the truth is very credible’. Alan Johnson is no stranger to the stresses of politics; at a time when the Labour Party was in one of its spells of deeper disarray he was unwise enough to take on the job of Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer only to be rapidly removed from it. He is however a renowned electioneer, which gave a particular force to his dismissal of Gove.

Have Your Say was the official advice from both sides in the Referendum. A hopeful change from the usual electoral dictate amounting to Shut Up, Believe What We Say And Vote Likewise. Which missed the fact that in this matter as in all others there was nothing to choose between the variously competing groups, even when they themselves were in such confusion. Why should anyone have supported any of them? The EU battle exposed the essential cross-party unity of capitalism’s politics, designed to defend and promote this class society and its inhumane divisions.

Ivan

Sin on the Underground (1961)

From the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

What's your pet worry? The Congo? H-Bombs? The Cold War? Anybody who is preoccupied with these pleasantries may have missed the petty censorship which was recently imposed upon London's Tube stations and which passed, in fact, with only a little comment from one or two newspapers and the House of Lords. The subject of this censorship was a poster issued by the Family Planning Association which, after being displayed on many Tube stations, was withdrawn when the Transport Commission received some objections to it. The Commission justified their action by referring to a ruling of theirs which states that they “. . . will not accept posters which refer to religious or sacred subjects in a manner which might give offence or which contain matter or illustrations likely to be considered religiously controversial." 

What sort of a poster was it, to involve this ruling? We decided to find out. We spent a fortune on Tube fares, our eyes grew sore on advertisements for corsets, for films starring curvy B.B. or tough- slugging Westerners. We saw posters which exhorted the rush hour workers to partake of gracious living by drinking a certain Brown Ale—with out-of focus candelabra in the background.

Apparently, nothing in this pot-pourri of sex, violence and alcohol had raised a murmur of protest. At last we found the poster. We examined it closely, searched diligently for something in it which a reasonable person might object to. We could find none. It was not offensive, nor was it lewd. If anything, the people in it were a little overdressed.

It is difficult, then, to imagine the majority of Tube passengers objecting to this advertisement. We can only assume that it was removed because of a minority of religious purgers, who pressed their point in a barrage of protest. We have seen this happen before; the Lord’s Day Observance Society has used the technique for years, often against Roman Catholics. A more subtle method of suppression, this, than of yore, when Catholics would reduce to human charcoal any burglar or peasant who had difficulty in grasping a Papal chemical formula about bread and wine turning into flesh and blood. Or when Calvinists would burn a scholar who rejected a complex theory which held that there was a being called God, who was three people—and at the same time only one. More subtle, because the spread of materialist knowledge has made it harder to whip up hatred over theological disputes; but still reprehensible. For human progress depends upon the decisions of conscious people, not upon gags applied to society by a sanctimonious minority.

What about birth control? Much of the opposition to it is almost a mania for the intensely personal nature of sexual relationships makes it easy to rouse strong feelings in the matter. Some opponents—notably the Catholics —maintain that the use of contraceptives is a defiance of the "Almighty Will": others that it invites an increase in juvenile promiscuity. Can we expect, then, that Catholics are not promiscuous? The Chief Medical Officer of the London County Council has reported that during 1959 there were 183 unmarried female immigrants from Catholic, anti-birth control Eire who, because they were pregnant when they came to this country, had to be assisted by the L.C.C. Welfare department. The Catholic Church is as helpless as any other organisation in these matters. Without a doubt, much of the religious opposition to birth control is roused by the fact that it is an attempt to shape our own environment, instead of leaving it to the will of a mythical supernatural being.

In fact, birth control is at present only a method of spreading out workers' relative poverty, an attempt to prevent ourselves slipping too far into degradation and dire need. Whether we practice it or not, whether we have two children or sixteen we remain workers, depending on our wage to live. In underdeveloped countries, birth control is often given official backing, but the older established capitalist nations leave it as a matter of personal choice, only raising the issue of government support in. for example, times of slump.

We should remember that man’s future lies within his own society and that birth control could be a factor in fashioning the sort of world that man desires. But this in turn depends upon man’s social knowledge and his rejection of, for example, religious theories with their threats of hellfire and purgatory. When he has reached that stage, he will be facing the many aspects of living a civilised life in a developed society and there will be no bigots to decide what he may or may not do.

Jack Law

London a hundred years ago (2002)

Book Review from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The People of the Abyss by Jack London. Pluto Press, Centenary edition, £10.99 paperback, 192 pages.

Those vaguely familiar with Jack London know him as a skilled writer, basing many of his stories on experiences from his rich, colourful and often dangerous life. Few remember him as the skilled political commentator and social critic who exposed many of the inequalities of his day. The People of the Abyss is Jack London the investigative reporter giving an impassioned account of the degradation and squalor endured by the people of the East End of London in 1902, and this year marks the centenary of his visit to this part of London.

Living in the East End doss houses, London posed as a stranded American sailor, down on his luck. He mingled with the poorest of the poor, worked alongside them, ate with them, drank with them and slept amongst them in the workhouses. His observations are documented in full; and this is no work of fiction. This is the London in the days when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was about to be formed, and reading Jack London's account of the privation endured by millions of his fellow workers, one can't help but ask why the clamour for an end to capitalism was not being screamed from every rooftop. He attempts an answer himself:

“Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be fed and housed as a pig is fed and housed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.”

And who could blame them? For many in the East End of London in 1902, the daily struggle to live absorbed all their energies. Their life expectancy was 30 years; 55 percent of children died before the age of five. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished men and women yearned only the public houses and alcohol in a pathetic attempt to “express their gregariousness” and because intoxication finally “brings the oblivion that nothing else can bring”. This is the England “where a constant army of 8 million lives on the border of starvation”; where hundreds of thousands of families inhabit one room, and where “children take turn about in sitting up and drive the rats away from the sleepers; where the lucky go insane and the courageous commit suicide. And all of this when Britain had the largest empire ever know and milked the world

The Socialist Party was not alone in the formative years of the 20th Century in pointing out that we live in the world of potential abundance. Lamenting the widespread starvation of the day, the “hunger wail” that echoed across the British Isles, London comments:

“And this in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300 and boots and shoes for 1000 . . . and who dares to say that it is not mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?”

The People of the Abyss is a masterly recording of the lives of the masses in 1902, and a poignant indictment on the capitalist system, and London is to be commended. However he affords us no solution to the ills of the system he lambasts, but rather finishes with a lengthy note about how it is being mismanaged by its rulers, before ending:

“There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man's producing powers an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of Civilisation live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear and protect them from the elements than the savage Inuit in a frigid climate who lives today as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago.”

The People of the Abyss deserves to be read, for a century after this book was written it is still possible to record the same, in spite of all the scientific and technological breakthroughs that have occurred since 1902 and which should be benefiting humanity.

John Bissett

Ups and downs (2005)

Book Review from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital Resurgent. Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. By Gérard Dumenil and Dominique Lévy. Harvard University Press. £35.95.

The first parts of this book are filled with graphs and tables which deal with categories Marxists can recognise, such as the rate of profit, the rate of capital accumulation, and the share of wages and of profits in value added. Dumenil and Lévy argue that what drives the capitalist economy is the rate of profit and that this had begun to fall even in the 1960s. They explain this by the slow-down in the technological progress of the previous two decades which had provided an expanding market for producer goods and so had driven the whole economy forward; this resulted in a fall in the rate of capital accumulation and consequently in the high level of unemployment that was a feature of the 1970s and 1980s. This is one possible Marxian explanation.

But then the approach changes. In the 1970s double-digit inflation benefited industrial capital at the expense of finance capital as loans could be repaid in depreciated money. According to Dumenil and Lévy, finance capital fought back by staging what they call a “coup” on 1979 – a sudden rise in interest rates as a way of trying to stop inflation. This put the boot on the other foot with, again according to the authors, firms having to use their profits to repay loans rather than re-investing them, so penalising growth and sustaining unemployment. This marked the beginning, they say, of the current period of “neoliberalism”, of deregulation and return to “free market” economics, as practised by Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain.

Dumenil and Lévy see this as a deliberate policy choice, imposed by finance capital and its representatives in government rather than any government’s reaction to a particular set of capitalist conditions. Their position can be summed up as “another policy is possible” (rather less ambitious than “another world is possible”, but a more accurate reflection of what the movement whose slogan this is actually stands for). This other policy turns out to be the sort of monetary, financial and tax measures favoured, and applied in the 1950s and 60s, by the Keynesians which, according to the authors, worked acceptably enough, as far as this sort of thing is possible under capitalism, until the rate of profit dropped for other reasons and finance capital staged its coup.

A rather odd conclusion for writers claiming to be in the Marxist tradition, but even odder is their analysis of the 1929 crash and 1930s slump in purely monetary and financial terms, even suggesting that these could have been avoided if the right policies had been pursued.

Adam Buick

Royal parasites (1998)

Book Review from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Royals By Kitty Kelley. Warner Books, 1997.

There is a succinct quote in Kelley's new work which she attributes to a reporter writing on "The Firm" after Fergie's arrival on the scene: "Covering the royal family is like riding down a sewer in a glass bottomed boat." Indeed, sewage is all any decent study of the royal family would uncover and if the interested individual wishes to have their royal prejudices confirmed, this is the book to read.

In 500 pages, Kelley traces the royals from the timely name-change in 1917 (from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor) to the aftermath of the Charles-Diana split-up, en route pulling no punches in showing them to be the decrepit and outmoded institution they always have been and lambasting, without compunction, all of the main royal protagonists this century.

Recounting tales from emotional starvation to buggery and other sexual excesses, and questioning much royal parentage, Kelley shows herself to be as indifferent to the feelings of the royals as the latter are to their kin and their subjects. What Kelley exposes is a family no more fit to "rule" than the mentally retarded offspring they have surreptitiously had hidden from public view; a family obsessed with wealth, sex and privilege who will go to any lengths to maintain the same, from secret deals with Hitler to phone-tapping and media prosecutions. A family peopled by the racialist, the arrogant, the conceited, the pompous, the ill-mannered, sad and pathetic.

Humour abounds, from Lady Rothchild's claim that "we need to protect the royals from themselves", to a quote from Bernard Shaw describing them as "ruling by hallucination". And Kelley herself brings a smile to our lips, for instance, when she asserts that (at the time of the Charles-Diana wedding) "Britons needed to believe in the fairy tale to distance themselves from the awful reality of inner-city riots, IRA bombings and widespread unemployment".

Critics of Kelley's book, and they are legion, have suggested much of its content is hearsay and unsubstantiated but if only a fraction of what she claims were to be true then The Firm has a difficult time ahead.

The book is yet to be published this side of the Atlantic - most publishers fearing an expensive law suit - and it has received hardly any reviews. For the anti-royalist, this book is a treasure-trove. For the socialist, just another chapter in our Grand Remonstrance against capitalism. Though The Royals stands as an indictment of monarchy, their end will be no real cause for celebration. "A few less parasites on our backs" means simply that, altering not one iota the fact that we would continue to exist in a republic as wage slaves.

John Bissett

Editorial: Let’s Really Take Control (2016)

Editorial from the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, contrary to what Cameron banked on and what Big Business wanted, Britain is to leave the EU. The Tory leaders of the Brexit campaign, experienced vote-catching politicians that they are, were able to convince enough workers, including many of the worst off,  to carry the day.

Whether many of their voters believed their extravagant promises of a rosy future is another matter. Many would have been registering a protest vote against what global capitalism was doing to them. A vote for Remain would have been a vote for this to remain. Which, offered the chance to register an opinion, they could hardly have been expected to endorse. But If they really believed that the EU was responsible for their lot, they misidentified the culprit. As we said in our manifesto for the referendum, ‘The problem is not the EU … it’s capitalism’. As capitalism will continue to exist after Britain withdraws so too will the situation they protested against.

While the promises of the Brexiters – more money for the NHS, a reduction in VAT, higher wages for the unskilled – were the usual empty promises that politicians trade in, the dire predictions of the Remain camp were exaggerations designed to scare people into voting for them. It didn’t work but nothing much will change. Big Business will be able to live with Brexit and adapt to it. They will want continued free access to the single tariff-free European market with common standards and will expect the government to negotiate this.

One of Brexit’s more attractive slogans – in fact, minus the ‘of our borders’, its only attractive one  – was ‘take back control’, with its suggestion that people should be in a position to control their destiny; a tempting appeal to people unable to control what global capitalism has done and is doing to them.

While, after Brexit, the British Parliament will regain its power to enact what laws it wants, this will prove to be more nominal than real. Governments cannot control the way the profit system works. It’s the other way round. Governments have to adapt their policies to fit in with the economic laws of capitalism which dictate that making profits has to take priority over meeting people’s needs. Voters, parliaments and governments may propose, but capitalism disposes.

Brexit won’t change this. It was the case before Britain joined the EU in 1973 and will be the same after Britain leaves in 2019. Those who were led to think that Brexit will allow them to control their destiny have been cruelly deceived.

Socialists have always wanted working people to ‘take control’ of their collective destiny. That’s what socialism is all about. This is not possible under capitalism because it is a system  governed by uncontrollable economic laws which impose themselves on people whatever they want or decide. The only way to take control (‘back’ is out of place since the majority class of wage and salary workers has never had any control) is to take control of the places where we work and where wealth is produced and run them for the benefit of all.

Pathfinders: How would socialism deal with waste and pollution? (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

How would socialism deal with waste and pollution?

Profit-driven production in capitalism generates huge quantities of waste while recycling technologies have been slow to get started and the financial advantage of ignoring the problem continues to inform every level of production from car-plants to Kyoto. The rational capitalist calculation includes costs for energy (electricity, labour etc) and storage but not for waste and environmental damage nor for longer term sustainability. Usage-driven production in a socialist society would prioritise best quality production over cheap competitive rollout since by extending the lifetime and durability of goods this would minimize the environmental footprint. In addition it would inevitably set far greater store on minimizing or eliminating useless or dangerous by-products, because these would also represent longer-term energy costs.

The effort to control pollution levels in capitalism is a game in which by far the best  individual strategy is to continue polluting, while collective responsibility is a financially damaging option. Moreover, with oil companies increasingly struggling to find new oil reserves to replace those used up and ominous pressure mounting on those oil states not yet colonized by the USA, the perfect solution would be to find a way to turn waste into oil.

And that’s just what they’re doing in Carthage, Missouri (Focus, Aug 2004). Cars, houses and factories in Carthage are being fuelled from a clean oil that is produced by the Thermal Conversion Process, a huge waste-gobbler that can take any type of carbon waste including animal remains, car tyres, old computers and human sewage and within half an hour turn it into useful fertilizer minerals, carbon charcoal and oil. And unlike many energy-producing methods which use more energy than they produce, the TCP uses just 15 units of energy to 85 produced. Since the process only reuses already above-ground carbon it does not add permanently to existing carbon levels.

So what’s the catch? Lack of an obvious profit, of course. Says Dr Paul Horsnell, Head of Energy Research at investment bank Barclays Capital: “To transport and process all the waste, pay the energy costs, provide for the capital costs and still make a profit does look difficult at first sight. By comparison, fossil fuel oil is actually pretty cheap.” Despite this, its supporters are enthusiastic, claiming that processing all agricultural waste alone would remove the need for the USA to import any oil at all. Europe has shown interest and there are plans for new plants in Colorado and Italy. However the likelihood is that, unmoved by its clear environmental advantages, capitalism will only resort to this technology once it has run out of cheap and dirty options. For a socialist society bent on recycling waste and reducing oil dependency, things might be very different, with small TCP plants (presently too expensive to build) on the outskirts of every settlement.

How do you know people will cooperate?

Socialist theory relies on cooperation to work, but although capitalism is ostensibly a game of competition, the very act of playing the game involves a huge measure of cooperation over rules, so the ability of people to cooperate is beyond dispute. What is disputed is the nature of the circumstances determining one strategy or the other. Game theory has always been a controversial encroachment of mathematics into psychology. Its inventor, John von Neumann (also inventor of the computer CPU), infamously concluded from his test studies that the logical strategy of the West in the Cold War was a pre-emptive strike. Happily for us, even capitalist politicians weren’t that barking mad. Older versions (like Neumann’s Cold War example) tended to rely on simple two-player models with limited play duration, which criteria often produced aggressive or antisocial strategies. Later versions have added to the number of players, the level of complexity and the duration of play. Nowadays, among other curious approaches (see Out on a Limbic) game theory is being used increasingly as a way of understanding the complex and unpredictable behaviour of economic systems. In a new study (Economist, Jan 22, p.72) scientists call into question the underlying assumption of economics that people always rationally calculate their individual material outcomes, and suggest that human behaviour is actually governed by evolutionary stable ‘social’ strategies.  In this kind of game, players can adopt one of three strategies: cooperation at the risk of being betrayed, betrayal at the risk of gaining nothing, or reciprocation, warily cooperating but not trusting evidence of betrayal. Of 84 participants, 13% were cooperators, 20% betrayers and 63% reciprocators.

Although obviously not conclusive, this is suggestive of the received wisdom that most people are inclined to cooperate provided other people play fair. This finding ought to encourage doubters about socialist society’s long-term stability. People behave much as one would expect: they are not generally crooks, but they’re not suckers either.

Will socialism make us all happy?

Obviously not, if your mum has just died or your foot has just been run over. The tendency to see socialism as some kind of utopia must be resisted with every effort, although the sheer weight of misery pressing on people in capitalism does explain why socialists can be forgiven for sometimes overstating the case. Happiness cannot be bought, as everybody knows, but neoclassical economists, not being aware of this, have always relied on what people have ‘got’ and what they do as a measure of happiness. Unfortunately for the economists, this doesn’t explain why incomes have doubled in rich countries in the last 50 years but the number of people claiming to be ‘happy’ has stayed level at about 30% (Economist, Jan 15, p.73). In addition, studies of Harvard students showed that Marx’s notion of relative poverty (the huts and the palace story) was probably correct. The students preferred a lower income to a higher one provided nobody else was earning more. Income inequality is a ‘psychic wound’, says Richard Layard, author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, and the game of competition for money and status, being zero-sum,  can only ever confer wellbeing by taking it from somebody else. Thinking safely within the box of course, Layard proposes heavy income tax burdens to cancel out the superior well-being of the upper echelons.

Meanwhile researchers at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University are busy compiling something called the World Happiness Database (Time, Feb 7). According to this, poverty does not necessarily make you miserable, as the Latin Americans qualify as very happy people (for possible explanation, see above), while the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans are crying into their dollar bills. One surprising discovery is that Europe and especially Switzerland score so highly because people tend to be happier the more opportunities they have to vote. Says Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich and co-author of Happiness and Economics, speaking of Switzerland’s system of direct democracy involving several referenda a year: “People feel they have self-determination and a say in the political process, and that’s a big contributing factor to overall happiness.” Move over psychedelic drugs. If more democracy really equals more happiness, socialist society could be the ultimate kick.

Out on a Limbic

The fad for cross-disciplinary studies continues with psychology which, having been invaded by mathematics, itself turns to invading economics (Economist, Jan 15, p.68). The new ‘science’ of neuroeconomics is having a stab at explaining economic behaviour by studying the brain directly. Well, they’ve tried everything else. So far researchers using MRI brain-scanning equipment have established that the reason people find it hard to save money is because long-term plans involving deferred gratification activate the boringly intellectual pre-frontal cortex while blowing your stash on a big night out activates the infinitely sexier emotional centres of the limbic system. Their conclusion, that governments should force people to save, is not the conclusion a socialist would reach. Workers don’t get much immediate gratification. Let’s hear it for the limbic system.

Paddy Shannon

Exhibition Review: 'Imitation of Life' (2016)

Michael Armitage, Campus Divas

Exhibition Review from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imitation of Life was a 1959 film, directed by Douglas Sirk, that dealt with issues of ‘race’ and gender in the US. One of its characters was a black woman whose daughter had a light-enough skin to pass as white, and the film looked at how successful she was in making her way in the world. The film was controversial at the time, and remains so, in terms of the extent to which it questioned or reinforced stereotypes about black people.

Now an exhibition of the same title is on at the Home arts centre in Manchester. Its sub-title is Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, with ‘melodrama’ meaning something which is exaggerated and appeals to the emotions. Works by twelve artists are displayed.

Photos by Sophia Al-Maria deal with facial whitening creams, which are produced to be sold in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Many people in India are obsessed with having lighter-coloured skin. The packaging of the products is distorted in these shots, presumably echoing the faces to which these creams are applied.

Martine Syms looks at American situation comedies. The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992, was attractive to a black audience as it showed black people as just like anyone else, but it erased ideas of black struggle.

Jayson Musson provides a video, using his alter ego Hennessy Youngman, on ‘How to be a successful black artist’ (it is available on YouTube). Success involves, for instance, being angry, which can be achieved by looking at a photo of Emmett Till in his coffin (Till was beaten and shot in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of fourteen after speaking to a married white woman). If all else fails, fall back on slavery, as white people lack a comparable shared cultural experience. White people, he claims, do not want to understand black artists, as this would mean the artists being just like the white spectator. This is clearly satirical, but its aim is to comment on power relationships and hierarchies within the art world, since black artists (and women) are under-represented in galleries.

So an exhibition that different visitors will quite likely react to in different ways. But whether it is quite as significant as the curators claim is another question.  

Paul Bennett

Why not here? (1967)

A Short Story from the June 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two observers from Outer Space peer at the earth through the porthole of their orbiting space craft.

The younger one turns to his companion. 

“How many times have you made this trip?”

“I can’t remember”.

“Have they visited us?”

“Not yet. They haven’t yet developed a ship that can penetrate deep space”.

The younger man glances at a spent booster in close orbit.

“Is that what they are trying to do now?”

“No, they are merely concerned with getting to their dead satellite which they call the Moon.”

“Isn’t that rather a waste of time?” 

“Not as they see it. Technically it could be used as a launching base for longer trips, but they are also concerned about exploiting its mineral deposits for use on earth”.

“I suppose they are running out of natural resources”.

“The earth isn’t seriously short but the rival factions are individually concerned about getting their supplies cheaper”. 

“What do you mean—cheaper?”

The older astronaut leaned against the cabin wall and smiled.

“Down there on earth they have a system of society known as capitalism in which a small minority owns and controls the earth’s resources and they are enabled to continue in this state by the fact that the non-property owning class are quite ignorant of the fact”.

“How can a large number of people be ignorant of such an obvious fact?” 

“Because they are conditioned to accept the proposition that they live in the best of all possible worlds and that their leaders are much more capable than they of deciding which course they should follow”.

“Why do they need leaders? Are they blind, or imbeciles?”

“They need leaders for two reasons. Firstly that they suffer from the delusion that capitalism can be made to run in everyone’s interests, and secondly because they can’t visualise any other system. They vote for one set of rulers and when they don’t get what they had hoped for they vote for another set. The irony of the situation is that whichever set they return to power the ownership of the wealth remains the property of the same class”.

“It seems incredible. I can hardly believe you are serious. How long has this been going on?”

“Years and years. Now they are at a stage where they have solved the problems of production but they can’t distribute the wealth they produce”.

“Why not?”

“Because they operate an exchange system in which metal discs or pieces of coloured paper represent the value of the objects to be exchanged. The slave class receives a certain amount of discs and notes according to the number of hours worked.

“Different types of worker are paid different amounts. Basically it is decided by the amount necessary to keep a worker and his family and to produce more workers. After all, the owning class must never be short of slaves, who are also employed to protect their masters’ property”.

“How do they do that?”

“Every few years various sections of the earth population go to war. That is to say they don uniforms according to whichever interests they are protecting and they proceed to kill one another”.

“Whatever for?”

“To eliminate the opposition. They kill and maim their fellow beings, male and female, young and old, and destroy any form of wealth that could be used against them”.

“How ridiculous”.

“They don’t think so. They allow themselves to be duped into believing that their opponents will perpetrate all sorts of cruel acts against them if they are captured and by these means their masters keep the slaughter going”.

“How revolting”.

“Revolting or not, that is how private ownership works”.

The younger astronaut turned pale.

“We don’t have to land, do we? I wouldn’t like to go too close to that lot”.

“No, we are just seeing how they are getting on and who is destroying whom this time”.

“Are they all as savage as one another?”

“No. As a matter of fact they are highly civilised but they haven’t yet reached the stage of political development where they realise that there is a solution.

“There are political parties in various parts of the globe that want to overthrow the present system and introduce another called Socialism in which all wealth and resources will be owned by the whole community. Where everyone will help to produce what society needs and take from society whatever they need as individuals”.

“Exactly what we’ve got, in fact”.

“Precisely.

“It’s all so simple that I can’t understand why they haven’t thought of it a long time ago but the forces of capitalism are so powerful that the majority are still trying to make capitalism work in the interests of everyone”.

“But how can they do that?”

“They can’t, but they don’t know that yet.”

L.J.C.

A tender trap (1987)

From the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

It cannot be nostalgia which drives so many Tory propagandists to pine for the Labour Party as it used to be, when it was led by Attlee, Gaitskell and Wilson. There is — runs the argument — much to be said for Neil Kinnock: nice bloke, undoubtedly patriotic, responsible family man. keen on Rugby football; but his leadership of the Labour Party is like a pie crust which lies over an especially noxious filling — the Militants, the communists. the violent pickets, the local Labour councillors who put up the rates to provide grants for black, disabled homosexuals . . . "As soon as you see two blokes holding hands, give 'em a subsidy" said a London busworker to Labour candidate Ken Livingstone during the election. It was not, runs the argument further, at all like that in the good old days, when Labour was a moderate, reasonable party led by moderate, reasonable people who would not tolerate so much as a hint of extremism.

Is this a case of distance lending enchantment? By their standards, the Tories should consider the Attlee government to have been the most extremist, and the Labour Party under Kinnock to be the most moderate, in recent history. Attlee's government were responsible for that mass of nationalisation and for setting up structures like the National Health Service during their time in power from 1945 to 1951. Much of this went through with very little opposition from the Conservatives in parliament. In contrast Kinnock's Labour Party, in their election manifesto. offered only schemes like something called British Enterprise, to invest state funds in hi-tech industries; they promised to use the government's 49 per cent holding in British Telecom to "ensure proper influence in their decisions" and to convert the private holdings in BT and British Gas into a new type of security.

By those standards, the Tories of 1945-51 were more extremist than Labour members are today. In any case, how true is the assertion that the Labour Party of old was a placid, militant-free haven of unanimity? The first thing to be said is that at the time - whenever that was - the Tories did not see it in that way; in fact they have always used the extremist accusations against the Labour Party. To begin with Clement Attlee, when he won power in 1945, was derided by his opponents as a small, meek man unfit to live in Churchill's massive shadow. During the 1945 campaign, and afterwards. Attlee showed how wrong were these conceptions, that he was anything but a fuddy-duddy. His mild, distracted manner concealed a steely determination that British capitalism should be run to the benefit of its ruling class and in that cause he was as ruthless with his friends as with his enemies.

Attlee had not always had the image of puny respectability for he was once famously photographed giving the clenched fist salute at a Republican rally in Spain. He showed during the war and by his attitude to Russian capitalism in the Cold War that he was no Moscow-dominated subversive. The Labour Party in those days was by no means free of what are called extremists. There was, to begin with, the Bevanite clique who were the rallying point for Labour supporters impatient at the way their party was running British capitalism. The Bevanites were held up as the true conscience of the Labour Party, as proof that one day. whatever their problems. Labour would bring about the revolution for socialism. As a result, they were as reviled then as Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill are today. Then there was the group of Labour MPs who seemed to have taken seriously Labour's pledge that they would be sympathetic to Stalinist Russia - people like John Platts-Mills and Konni Zilliacus who could always be relied on for a public display of their blind support for the dictatorship in Russia and their readiness to excuse all its atrocities.

The time of Attlee's successor, Hugh Gaitskell, was no more notable for blissful unity. Gaitskell's reaction to the shock of losing the 1959 election was to set on foot the purging of Labour 's apparent commitment to wholesale nationalisation contained in Clause Four of the party constitution. There was no attempt to justify this change on grounds of principle; the case for getting rid of Clause Four was that it was a vote loser. This incensed many Labour Party members and not only the "extremists"; not a few people had joined the party because they believed, however mistakenly, that nationalisation was the solution to most of capitalism's problems. (It is another matter, if Gaitskell had had his way, whether these people would have done the logical, honest thing and resigned their membership. More probably they would have stayed in the party, wretchedly comforting themselves with the last-ditch defence that, however bad the Labour Party might be, it was better than the Conservatives).

There was another uproar in the Labour Party when Gaitskell was defeated in the 1960 conference vote on unilateral nuclear disarmament. The people who favoured disarmament put a simple argument - that nuclear weapons are too devastating to be allowed to remain in existence. This perfectly accurate statement was followed by the inaccurate and baseless assertion that the way to get rid of the weapons was to tell capitalism's governments how frightful they are (forgetting that those governments had developed the things precisely because of their awesome destructive power). The unilateralists seemed to think that voting for disarmament at a Labour Party conference would have some effect but Gaitskell made it quite clear that if he ever became prime minister he would run things as the interests of British capitalism demanded, not in accordance with how Labour delegates voted at their conference. The response of his faction to the unilateralists was also simple. Everyone agreed that the weapons were terrible but they could not be abolished because British capitalism needed them if it was to hold any place in the world power struggle; if Labour stood for getting rid of the British stockpile they would never again win an election:

Britain has to be defended today in conditions that exist today and not those we wish existed today. Until general disarmament is achieved, then deterrence means defence in those conditions. (George Brown, then Labour spokesman on "Defence").
. . .  the conference has to decide "what are our chances of securing political power". (Sam Watson, NEC member).

(Both at the Labour Party conference, 1960).

As it turned out there was a more subtle way of keeping the weapons and of winning elections while allowing the unilateralists to think that the government were in favour of getting rid of them. This trickery was wrought by Harold Wilson, who had dearly taken the opportunity of Gaitskell's struggles to quietly appear as Labour's great unifier. For example. he derided the "independent British nuclear deterrent” as neither independent nor British nor a deterrent. This was cheering to the CND followers, who took it to mean that a Wilson government would favour abolition of the British weapons. They have still not learned through such experiences; unilateralists still think that a Labour government is more likely to abandon the bomb than a Tory one is, they still think it useful to spend their time trying to get a unilateralist policy written into Labour policy, as if a Labour government would be in the slightest degree impressed.

The Wilson government banked on the success of their great planning bonanza, which was going to swamp us all in prosperity. Higher productivity would provide everyone with the best things in life. This was at most a disconnected argument but in any case the whole idea was quickly overtaken by a succession of economic and financial crises which could not be explained away even by Wilson's speeches. Labour's left wing extremists and their everyday members were in revolt — against the government's continual battles with the unions over pay rises, against Labour's support for American capitalism's war in Vietnam, against their compliance with the genocide in what was briefly the state of Biafra. It is true that Wilson generally managed to keep the dissidents in check; he had more problems with the other wing of his party, with people like Mayhew, Brown and Gunter but no one can look back on his leadership as a time of peace and unity in Labour's ranks.

Capitalist parties often accuse each other of being in the grip of "extremists". They all have their crazier elements who frighten the more impressionable among the other side. The Labour Party have Tony Benn, Denis Skinner, Ken Livingstone; the Tories have Peter Bruinvels, Terry Dicks and Harvey Proctor. One thing all these extremists have in common is the habit of avoiding reality — the economic laws and the inexorable demands of capitalism. Tory extremists may spout against coloured immigration but the reality is that those workers came to this country — many of them encouraged by the Ministry of Health when Enoch Powell was Minister — because of those laws. They constituted a pool of unemployed workers and. in the process of adjusting demand to supply. they moved to a place where there was a relative shortage of labour power. That is how capitalism works and how it will always work, whatever extremists may wish or say.

Extremists are often tamed by the temptations of power, which have the effect of miraculously purging them of all seditious ideas. Michael Foot, for example, was once one of Labour's most inveterate extremists, always liable to take the stand at the party conference to remind everyone about their supposed principles and the struggle of the common people . . . When he became a minister, at first under Wilson and then under Callaghan. Foot was obsessed with clinging onto power. This was despite that government being in continual conflict with the workers, coming to a climax in the Winter of Discontent, despite it seeing unemployment double, despite it beginning the programme of massive cuts in state spending which the Thatcher government continued.

The Labour Party still makes its appeal partly on grounds of principle, even though the "principles" become more and more vague so that now they are little more than an implied concern about poverty, health, peace and so on. But there remain people who are gullible enough to cling to the "principles". Their disappointment is inevitable - and in many cases so is their rebellion. If they persist in this they are liable to be labelled as extremist when all they really are is gullible and confused.

Nostalgia is a trap — more so when your opponents are nostalgic on your behalf. Just as the Tories pretend to pine for the days of Attlee. Gaitskell and Wilson so Labour supporters recall the Conservative Party of Churchill. Macmillan and Heath as more humane and unifying. If it is necessary for these parties to spread such confusion about each others' past, what hope can they hold for the future?

Ivan

Editorial: The Labour Party Betrays The Unemployed. (1925)

Editorial from the April 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

None of the three parties, Liberal, Labour, Conservative, has solved or can solve the problem of unemployment. All three stand for capitalism, with only minor disagreements on policy and administration, and unemployment cannot be abolished while capitalism remains. But in addition to making promises which they could not fulfil, each has also promised to make the condition of the unemployed ‘‘tolerable.” This they could do, and have all failed to do. The Labour Party was, and is, particularly forward in parading its sympathy with the innocent victims of capitalism, and in the present House of Commons some Labour M.P.'s have attacked a new regulation which will deny unemployment pay to many who have been out of work the longest. To their protests on this, as on nearly every other matter, the Conservatives are able to reply by pointing out that they are only continuing the policy of the Labour Party when it was in office. As Ellen Wilkinson remarks (“Lansbury’s Labour Weekly," Feb. 28, 1925):—

It is, of course, distinctly aggravating for the female Labour Member to be referred to the actions of her own Government last year as a justification for anything that she objects to the Conservatives doing.

But, aggravating or not, it happens to be true.

Thus Brailsford, in the “New Leader" (March 13th), says of the new Circular:—

Even before this tightening process began, 120,000 persons were deprived of benefit since August. last year, and to this total about 30,000 will now be added.

The Labour Party, through whose action the dole has been stopped from 120,000 persons, cannot very well throw stones at their successors, who have not yet reached a quarter of that total.

Mr. George Lansbury contributed, among others, to the unemployment debates (Hansard, March 9th, 1925). His proposal was to give every young man between 18 and 25 the choice between starvation and working on the land. If they refused to work at a “fair wage," he would not let them have a farthing. At present agricultural wages are, many of them, in the neighbourhood of 30s. for a man of 21, with lower rates for those below that age. Two years ago, when Mr. J. R. MacDonald “settled" a strike of Norfolk land workers, he obtained for them a “fair wage" of 25s. Mr. Lansbury is apparently satisfied that a man ought to be allowed to starve who refuses exhausting work for long hours on the land, work, too, for which most of the unemployed are, quite unfitted both by training and through semi-starvation if they have been long out of work. Yet with the Communists and other so-called “left-wingers" Lansbury passes as a Socialist.

But the proposal is foolish as well as being anti-working-class. There are already land workers unemployed. If, therefore, more agricultural produce is to be grown and thrown on the market, prices will fall and still more land will go out of cultivation, and men at present working will lose their jobs. A possible alternative is that the produce be used to maintain the unemployed instead of being sold. This, however, immediately raises the question of cost. As it happens, the capitalist class have so far been of the opinion, and probably correctly, that the system of doles and relief is the cheapest possible one for them.

The unemployed have to he kept from sheer starvation, and the capitalists have to foot the bill. They may pay a man 18s. to do nothing, or set him to work on the land, but if they do the latter it costs them much more than 18s. A man working hard eats more, wears out more clothes, and must have better clothes and boots, as well as tools, machinery, etc. Rent would need to be paid and, in short, it is fairly certain that the dole is cheaper and that the capitalists do know more about this aspect of capitalism than do the Labour amateurs who are so anxious to administer the system for them. This is but one of the many brilliant futilities offered by the Labour Party to solve what is within capitalism insoluble.

Pathfinders: Great Men of Straw (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Items in the news last month included a NASA report that April was the seventh month in a row to break global temperature records, that five Solomon Islands have now disappeared underwater, that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and that the first ever global assessment, from botanists at London's Kew Gardens, has declared that 21 percent of all plant species are now under threat of extinction.

This litany of climate-related misery was not in the least relieved by news that politicians have completed the business of ratifying the Paris Climate accord, whereby the world's nations will join arm-in-arm and shoulder-to-shoulder to fight climate change with their combined unstoppable forces of piety, chewed lips and crossed fingers.

It surely won't be just socialists who, on reading the paper every morning, have that familiar Solomon-sinking feeling that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and nobody, especially not the capitalist politicians, has a blind clue what to do about it.

It's anybody's guess what effect climate change will have on global politics in the future. Perhaps the world will look over the precipice and experience a dramatic epiphany and adopt world socialism in a process which the German sociologist Ulrich Beck described as 'emancipatory catastrophism' (New Scientist, 30 April). Somehow though we don't think so. The best way to make a house habitable is not to burn it down first.

An interesting clue about climatic effects in history was reported recently by a team of volcanologists and historians who looked at events in Roman history from around 250 BC and matched them with evidence (from Antarctic ice cores et al) of volcanic eruptions (New Scientist, 7 May). The team claims a close correlation between eruptions and domestic uprisings in Ptolemaic Egypt, due to poor rainfall in the Ethiopian uplands and corresponding flood failures in the Nile valley, leading to failed harvests. They argue that eight out of ten documented revolts against the Ptolemaic rulers started within two years of an eruption. Ultimately, runs the reasoning, this weakening of Egypt led to the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, which opened the way for the Augustan Empire and the beginnings of the modern western world.

You can argue the pros and cons of this fun idea. Clearly the modern world doesn't owe its origins to the teleological absurdity of a couple of volcanoes going off pop at crucial moments. For one thing, Egypt was not especially weak, economically speaking, as was shown by the fact that Marc Anthony stopped the supply of Egyptian grain, upon which Rome heavily relied, in order to blackmail the Senate. As for Actium, Octavian's general Agrippa probably ought to have some credit, and besides it may just be that the Egyptians were never that great at winning sea battles - if you look at a Wikipedia list of ancient naval battles, there are numerous Egyptian naval defeats and the only instance of a victory was c 1190 BC against an unidentified opponent (the 'Sea Peoples'), making the event more legend than fact.

Quibbles aside, the thing to note in all this is that you never hear anybody, scientist or historian or for that matter the bloke down the pub, nowadays saying things like 'That Augustus (or maybe Julius Caesar) was a genius, you know, we wouldn't be anywhere today without him.' It's worth noting this because in Victorian times the dominant view was somewhat different, as summed up by Thomas Carlyle: 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men' (and he meant men). This 'heroic' view, set out in his 1841 book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, gave scant consideration to social conditions, economic affairs or other environmental circumstances and instead saw history rather like a mute and passive baton passed from one hero to the next, to do with as they saw fit. The only reason to study history, as Carlyle saw it, was to understand heroes like Muhammad, Pericles or Napoleon in order to behave more like them.

The obvious fact that most people are not in a position to behave like these 'heroes' (and would be locked up in a psyche ward if they did) means that they don't count for anything at all and are written out of history as irrelevant. Small wonder then that the heroic view flattered the conceits of the bourgeoisie and was also popular with intellectual academicians like Nietzsche.

Not everyone was persuaded. Herbert Spencer considered the heroic view as bordering on infantile and responded furiously that 'before he (the great man) can remake his society, his society must make him', an argument that socialists more generally associate with Karl Marx and the materialist conception of history.

In the materialist view, change can occur due to many non-material factors, whether social, psychological (or heroic), cultural or historical, but economic conditions tend usually to be the crucial and generally decisive factor. Marx used the terms base and superstructure, and we can envisage this as a piece of land with buildings on it. Thus, a fire in an upper storey of one cultural building (say paedophile scandals in the Catholic Church) might have some small effect on other structures but none at all on the material foundations of society. In contrast, an earthquake in the economic base, the land itself, would certainly upset all the cultural structures built on top of it.

O tempora, o mores. Nowadays the materialist perspective has achieved orthodoxy among academic historians (Carlyle would be flunked out of college), while workers in general are conspicuously divided between materialists on the one hand and hero-worshippers on the other. This is a big problem because how you look at history deeply influences what you intend to do and can expect to achieve in the future.

Materialists ought to be socialists because they instinctively grasp that real change can only occur through a shaking up of the economic base of society, or what we call revolution. The hero-worshippers continue to hope in the face of all the evidence for a hero to emerge and save them, in the form of some politician or demagogue, and are thus grasping at nothing at all except straws and straw men.

Paddy Shannon

Some Cash Points (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scattered throughout the land, with the inconspicuous ubiquity of the beggars who are now everywhere, is a new form of life-support machine. They are to be found on every major street, sometimes several of them in a row. Staggering towards them, gasping for the machines, are endless streams of wretches who queue before the machine, like Muslims before Mecca. Cards in hands they stand - we stand, for you and I are there frequently - and appeal to the money machine, like robots in search of oil to keep them toiling.

In the face of the cash machine all claims to individuality collapse. “I AM A NUMBER” you remind yourself, as you tap in the four digits given to you by the bank to register your new identity. It is no use tapping in a stanza from Shelley, a line or two from Morrissey, an extract from your diary . . . The machine does not want to know who you are or how you feel, but simply how much money you want and how much money you arc allowed to have. It issues cold instructions: PRESS AMOUNT REQUIRED - WAIT - TAKE THE CARD - TAKE THE MONEY PROMPTLY . . . Missing you already!

That is the pleasant scenario. The cash machines have no obligation to deliver the dosh. Let us say

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

that a mother with two kids approaches The Machine, inserts her card and requests £30 so that she can buy enough to feed her children for the week. She has exceeded her overdraft. The Machine misses nothing. Request denied. There is no right to appeal on grounds of need: WITHDRAW YOUR CARD AND GO AWAY. Next in the queue stands a businessman who has made his fortune out of renting out slum properties to the poor. He is about to clinch a deal and proposes to withdraw £100 to pay for a decent business lunch. (Wine doesn’t come cheap in the decent restaurants, you know.) He inserts his card and The Machine, still angry at the audacity of the greedy mother and her excessive demands, pours out the twenty-quid notes, reassured that the world makes sense once more.

If you have no money you go without. In some countries you watch your babies slowly starve to death. In this country you face the indignities, discomforts and insecurities of scraping by with needs greater than you have money. There is no greater symbol of alienation than money. It tramples on our freedoms and desires, crushing hope in the impoverished and lavishing endless powers upon the extremely rich. The cash machine is symptom, not cause of this state of affairs. It is an inanimate player in a cruel game. The man who was seen some weeks ago in Camden Town kicking the wall containing the cash machine of the Royal Bank of Scotland made no impact upon the system which made him poor. (Even as a gesture of mere anti-Scots nationalism it would have been impotent.) Had he smashed open the machine and strangled it with its own thinly-wired innards The Tyranny of Money would have been dented no more than by the knocking-off of a policeman’s hat during an anti-war demonstration. The machine has built-in resilience.

Some months ago in a Budgen supermarket a woman presented her goods at the till, was given her bill and then presented her Visa card to the cashier. The card was inserted into the machine and, within seconds, popped out with the word VOID appearing in the appropriate slot. Her card was not accepted the cashier asked for cash. The woman had none. She looked around her, perhaps hoping that one of us in the neighbouring queue would pull out their wallet and act the Samaritan rather than shuffle the coins in our pockets and feel sorry for her. She burst into tears and left without the shopping. An unpurchased cabbage stood as a monument to her poverty. Did she go home and curse Budgen or the Tories or the blacks or the Jews . . . or maybe join the suicide statistics . . .  or maybe, like me and like you, accommodate herself to the sickly rituals of spending within her means? We can be sure that the credit-card machine lost no sleep over the drama. It is just a machine, and the cashiers, the managers, the accountants and producers of goods merely appendages to the machine.

In the Little Chef restaurant on the M1 the waiters plug themselves into the cash till before taking our money. It is apparently a security measure to ensure that the appendage pays sufficient homage to the machine. It is hard to think of a more symbolic image of the alienating bondage of money fetishism than a grown man plugging himself into a money machine.

Steve Coleman

Taking care of number one (1996)

Theatre Review from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brothers of the Brush by Jimmy Murphy (Arts Theatre)

Capitalism brutalises human relationships. Politicians are right when they talk about the importance of 'competing with economic opponents’ and 'the struggle to survive’. The dynamics of capitalism sets class against class, pits country against country and individuals against one another.

The fortune tellers of capitalist economics argue that those who survive the vicious culling of the work force as companies struggle to reduce costs, feel powerful and empowered. Analysts report, however, that the facts are rather different: that the survivors are frequently inhibited by uncertainty and riddled with guilt.

In Brothers of the Brush, a new play by Jimmy Murphy, at the Arts Theatre, the corrosive impact of the black economy on working relationships is examined with an authentic blend of humour and merciless honesty. Four flawed but decent men fell victim of exploitation and the power games of management and unions, with predictable and tragic results.

Here is a play of rare passion and skill, with dialogue as sharp and convincing as anything currently available in London. Murphy chillingly demonstrates that morality is determined by the inexorable laws of economics, and that in the dog eat dog world of capitalist economics the niceties of social behaviour are frequently a victim of the need to survive.

Writing about his play Murphy observes that "In the black economy unions are as redundant as the workforce they once represented, old alliances are spurned, ideologies discarded, a new creed is the order of the day, look after number one".

But looking after number one - whether it be class, group or individual - is at the very heart of capitalism. Murphy’s unsentimental, vivid and serious drama is in feet an unflinching attack on the barbarisms of employment

After the burdens of watching two pieces of pretentious, bourgeois drama on recent visits to the theatre, Murphy’s play is like a douche of cold, refreshing water. This is a play about real people feeing real dilemmas. It is beautifully constructed, poignant piece of theatre. If you can’t catch it in London do look out for it when it is produced locally. Thoroughly recommended.

Michael Gill

Being Dumped (2012)

Book Review from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts, Faber and Faber, £9.99

Don’t judge a book by its cover – or by its title. This is actually a well-researched investigation of the environmental crisis in China based on visits to many different parts of the country.

Western companies have outsourced a great deal of manufacturing to China, from iPods to shoes and toys. In addition, a lot of waste from production in the West is sent to China: ‘It was cheaper to send a container of waste from London to Guangdong on an otherwise empty ship than it was to truck it to Manchester.’Computers and mobile phones (e-garbage) are transported to China, and dangerous chemicals extracted from them.

One town, Qiaotouin Zhejiang province, has become the world centre of zip and button production. Making zips islabour-intensive and requires relatively little by way of capital investment, but, at least when practiced without proper environmental controls, it is highly polluting, and on some days flakes of white plastic fill the Qiaotou air.

It is fairly well known that working as a coal miner in China is extremely dangerous, with a death rate pertonnemined thirty times that in the US. This is partly because the economy depends greatly on coal for almost 70 percent of its energy needs. Hydroelectric plants may be cleaner in theory, but they tend to attract dirty factories in their vicinity and coal-fired power stations, too, which provide electricity in the dry season, something dams cannot do. President Hu Jintao is a hydro engineer, and the company he used to work for is now the world’s biggest dam-building corporation. 

It is not just a matter of dirty industries being moved from the West to Japan and Taiwan and then to China, for within China they are increasingly being shifted from the coastal areas to more remote inland provinces where environmental regulations are even laxer and local politicians are keen on ‘development’at almost any cost.

It’s little wonder that even other capitalist countries are becoming concerned at China’s record on the environment: it contributes massively to polluting the globe and enables Chinese capitalists to undercut many Western companies.

Paul Bennett