Within the System (2004)

Book Review from the May 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within the System. By Richard Montague. (Trafford Publishing, £9.75.)

Richard Montague is well known as a contributor to the Socialist Standard on both events in Ireland and the wider case against capitalism and for socialism. Now a collection of 24 of his short stories has been published. The author believes that the creative arts, including short story writing, have an important role in exposing the grim reality of global capitalism. Few socialists would disagree.

The star of the show, for this reviewer at any rate, is the longest and arguably the most imaginative story, ‘General Immunity Serum‘. GIS originates in a small drug research laboratory in London and is marketed as a fortifying agent to reinforce the body’s resistance to minor ailments. The makers produce leaflets, but the most effective promotion turns out to be local radio. Callers swear that GIS has solved their health problem: baldness, migraine, asthma, allergies, arthritis – even cancer and AIDS.

Soon the huge popularity and success of GIS around the world causes problems for the capitalist economy. Shares in drug and chemical companies plummet, followed by insurance shares. Hospitals close; doctors, nurses and auxiliary staff become unemployed. GIS’s conquest of human sickness and disease destroys millions of jobs in industries unconnected with medicine – the building trade, motor manufacture and marketing, and so on. Millions of home owners with mortgages are thrown into hopeless negative equity.

There is much unrest and civil strife on a world scale. The British government sets up a Royal Commission. Its majority report urges “bold initiatives to kick-start the economy”; its minority report wants GIS to be declared an illegal substance. At a rally in Hyde Park a speaker reveals the real problem and its solution. Because of the way society is organised, GIS can be regarded as a terrible catastrophe. The answer is a society based on co-operative production for needs and free access to the means of satisfying those needs.

The ‘Last Story’ concerns a newspaper editor about to retire who confronts his employer with a front-page story he knows won’t get published: “Economy murders 40,000 kids!... Yesterday 40,000 children died because economics, the way we order production and distribution in our world, could not afford £5,000 for food and medicines to keep them alive!”

‘Maggie’s Dream’ is an amusing tale about how Margaret Thatcher has a nightmare that she is in a strange new world without money and the market. Dennis complains that his money won’t buy him even a nip. A companion with an outsize briefcase containing ú15m in paper money finds that this won’t buy him a lump of bread. Maggie, shocked but undeterred, says “They’ll have to learn to appreciate the magic of the market.”

On a more sombre note, ‘Pieces of Paper’ is a moving account of how a war-damaged man (“not crazy, just a bit... peculiar”) copes with a life of poverty. George is employed, Saturdays only, as a cleaner and gardener for £10 a week. His far-from-rich employer has a wife who wants a second-hand car. So they can no longer afford to pay George the £10. On learning this his reaction is remarkable but not angry or self-pitying: “It’s all mad, isn’t it, sir?... There’s the world out there, a veritable fairyland of everything, far more for everybody that needs or wants more... And, y’know, few would really want more if everybody had enough.”

The last story, ‘Contrasts’, is the only one outside, rather than within the system. It describes a radio broadcast by a historian on 3 June 2077. The Revolution – free access democracy – had swept across the entire planet in 2046. Elections, one spurring the other, brought down the entire world capitalist political structures like a vast domino trail. The old system was considerably modified in the period preceding the Revolution. The capitalists themselves became frenetic reformers as they tried to hold off their own downfall. “The new way of life entailed a great ‘openness’ between people that was utterly alien within capitalism... What was a fragmented, vicious and secretive world of internecine greed and strife became a... a family, a human family of equals.”

Stan Parker