Sunday, June 8, 2008

Cooking the Books: The nature of business (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember the scenes in January last year when hundreds flocked to Branscombe beach in Devon to scavenge for the cargo of a beached container ship? Some saw this as confirmation of the popular prejudice that it is "human nature" to grab, grab, grab. Actually, it was a manifestation of human behaviour in a society where normally everything has to be paid for when something becomes unexpectedly and temporarily available for free.

But that's not the main lesson of the incident. This April the Marine Accident Investment Branch (MAIB) of the Department for Transport published its report on what happened (See here for the report). The report didn't just deal with the technical aspects of why the hull cracked and why the ship had to be beached to avoid a serious oil spillage but looked at the wider context too.

In section 2.10 on the "Container Ship Industry", the MIAB observed:
"Without the ability to quickly ship large quantities of containers across the oceans, containerisation would be generally constrained within the continents. However, the commercial advantages of containerisation and intermodalism such as speed and quick turnarounds appear to have become the focus of the industry at the expense of the safe operation of its vessels. The industry is very schedule driven, and operators inevitably have an eye on the timetable when making key decisions".
On the particular accident last January, the report went on:
"In this case, the decisions to sail: without an operational governor; sail in excess of the maximum permissible seagoing bending moments in order to allow greater flexibility for the time of departure; to operate at near maximum bending moments when underway; and to keep the ship's speed as fast as possible when pounding into heavy seas, were symptomatic of the industry's ethos to carry as much as possible as quickly as possible".
This wasn't the first time the MAIB had pointed this out. The report quotes from a previous report put out in September 2007 on another accident:

"Working practices relating to the planning, loading, transportation and discharge of containers are largely unregulated and have been understandably focussed on the need to maximise efficiency and speed of operation. While key industry players will attest that safety is of paramount concern, evidence obtained during this and other MAIB investigations into container shipping accidents suggests that in reality, the safety of ships, crews and the environment is being compromised by the overriding desire to maintain established schedules or optimise port turn round times".
Something will no doubt be done to tighten up the regulations – or rather the unenforceable "code of best practice" – if only because accidents cost the shipping companies money. But the real question is why weren't proper safety measures already in place? The answer is the commercial pressures that all firms are subject to under capitalism. The shipping companies are all in competition with each other for business, and those who can deliver quicker get the contracts.

It is not human nature to grab, grab, grab, but it is the nature of capitalist businesses to take risks and cut corners with safety to win the battle of competition and make more profits.

Football: a capital idea (2008)


From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard
Football is now a commodity packaged and sold to make money for the clubs’ shareholders.
Football fans were given something meaty to chew on recently when the English Football Association appointed an Italian, Fabio Capello, as manager of the national team. Capello, in turn, brought with him a bevy of besuited Italian colleagues to help him to ensure that England qualify for, and preferably do well in, the next major tournament, the 2010 World Cup.

Most football fans, including large sections of the press, have been tearing their hair out in frustration because the England team hasn’t been doing too well recently in comparison with the top national sides. (Let’s leave aside the fact that England isn’t strictly speaking a nation and that the United Kingdom actually has four ‘national’ teams). The crunch came when the previous manager, Steve McClaren, failed to ‘lead’ England to the 2008 European Championship finals this coming summer. He was considered not to have enough charisma or technical know-how for the job. Capello was seen as the best qualified manager to take over. The only fly in the ointment was his nationality, but for the sake of getting the right man, this was overlooked and those who would have preferred an Englishman breathed a collective sigh of resignation. At least this foreigner, with his no-nonsense approach and impressive managerial CV, might knock a bunch of spoiled, overpaid players into shape and win something.

This is not the first time a foreigner has been involved in English football, although based on the press coverage and fan reaction, we’d have been forgiven for thinking so. Only a few years ago, the England team was managed by a Swede, Sven-Goran Eriksson, but, perhaps because he spoke good English and was temperamentally more like an Englishman than Capello, he was more readily accepted. More significantly, there is now a proliferation of non-English players in professional English club football, to the extent that some sides rarely field an English player at all. In this sense, the game in some quarters is truly cosmopolitan.

Looking farther back, the reality is that there has always been a foreign or non-local element in English football. Almost from its inception as an organised sport, in the late nineteenth century, players moved around from club to club if their services were required. Thus we had, firstly, northerners playing for southern clubs and vice versa, then Scots playing for and managing English clubs, then English players and managers moving abroad to foreign clubs as their overseas counterparts came in the opposite direction, only more recently in far greater numbers. At every stage of increasing “foreignness”, there were many objectors.

But after the inevitable cries of horror, each encroachment of ‘foreigners’ into the game is accepted as long as it helps ‘your’ team to win. For the fans, winning is an end in itself, a kind of vicarious success and reflected glory. For the players, it means a better living (sometimes, in the case of the top players, dramatically so). For the clubs, it is a means of making profits, or at least avoiding losses and staying in business. So if foreign players and managers can help in the process of winning, most people involved in the game are satisfied, albeit grudgingly in some cases.

The other side of the coin is that employing foreign players and managers is regarded as a failure for the national game. The general view is that the England team is not good enough because, as a result of the foreign influx, there aren’t thought to be enough good English players or managers bubbling up through the system.

Shame, we are told, and we hear players saying that to play for their country is the greatest honour. But interestingly, club managers aren’t so patriotic – they don’t like ‘call-ups’ for fear their players get injured and reduce the chances of winning for their club.

The issue of club versus country or national versus foreigner in football is a reflection of the confused attitude to nationalism in capitalist society in general. After all, organised football is entirely a product of capitalism. The same is true of all modern professional sport. Its increasingly ruthless and competitive nature is a direct result of the increasingly ruthless and competitive society it is a part of. Here are some more examples which show the increasing pervasiveness of capitalism into sport as in everyday life.


  • Sponsorship is a big money-spinner: thus we see a proliferation of company logos on team kit and perimeter fencing. ‘Lesser’ sports get away with even more crass commercialism, such as the large RBS logo painted into the centre of rugby pitches and angled directly at the camera such that it is almost constantly in view.
  • Merchandising is an integral aspect of any football club’s everyday activities: typified by the annual introduction of new strip to keep up sales of replica shirts.
  • Pressure to succeed becomes ever greater: at some clubs, huge sums are paid for what are seen as star players and managers (regardless of nationality), who are then discarded almost as a matter of routine after a year or less if they don’t bring instant success.
  • As in many other areas of capitalism, the top strata of football are awash with money while there’s precious little to spare lower down, with many of the smaller clubs are living from week to week.
  • We have the absurd situation of millionaire players bullying referees who until recently didn’t even get paid to do the job.
  • There is regular tinkering with the laws of the game to make it a more entertaining, and thus saleable, ‘product’.
  • Clubs are now known as brands – even some players such as Beckham.
  • Returning to the nationality issue, the increase in foreign ‘trade’ reflects the increasingly global nature of capitalism: witness the recent proposal of the Premier League for an extra match per team each season, to be played at various venues around the world – there can be no other reason than that of generating more profit.
  • The game is ultra-competitive: mistakes by players or referees are more and more costly; at a far lower level we have pushy parents on the touchline at school matches bullying their children to play harder and be more like the heroes they worship.
  • So much rides on success that you have to have a winner. This is particularly ironic in football when roughly 25% of matches are drawn. The draw is increasingly unacceptable, hence the increasing number of penalty shoot-outs to replace replays.
  • The desire to win also perversely means a fear of losing – for many decades the game has been over-defensive, with too few goals.
  • Teams are run on almost military lines, with the players being routinely drilled like soldiers by their coaches and disciplined by referees and organising bodies.
  • Football is now a so-called ‘middle class’ game and lower-paid fans are being priced out. To watch even a modest club play can cost three times as much as a cinema ticket.
  • Most of the above observations are commented on weekly in the national press. Most football fans agree that money coupled with the overweening greed of the big clubs is spoiling the game. Alas, lasting solutions are never suggested since most fans and journalists are as blinkered by the constraints of money-based society as the sport’s practitioners.

    The only way to stop the rich clubs getting richer and the poor clubs getting poorer is not to limit the amount of money in the game or to distribute it more evenly – a virtually impossible task anyway – but to take the money out of football altogether. And that in turn means abolishing money in all other areas of life. And how do we stop foreigners being brought in to manage the national team? Well, why don’t we try abolishing nationality? The national football team is a product of the nation as a competing political unit in capitalism, and in a nationless society would have no role.
    Rod Shaw