To Socialists, the publication of the 1800 page Scott Report ranks as one of the great non-events of recent times. All the Report really revealed is that British government ministers, notably Alan Clark, were doing what they're in office for — looking after the economic interests of the British capitalist class.Certain Tory government ministers, even the whole Tory government, have, it seems, been both caught out and let off the hook—though perhaps temporarily. Amid reports in, for example, the Independent (17 February) and the Observer (18 February), suggesting that Lord Justice Richard Scott has been somehow “nobbled” by government ministers, “persuaded” to be gentle with them, the facts remain in the public domain; whatever insipid conclusions Scott has come to, everybody else can judge for themselves. It is even almost as though Scott might have intended that they should do so. Having apparently bowed to pressure, induced perhaps by invocations of old school ties or past favours, or even favours to come, it is as though he has washed his hands of the matter but, unable to square his conscience with letting corrupt liars and dissimulators off scot-free, he has left it to a vague and amorphous “public opinion” to sit in judgment in his place.
That government ministers lied to parliament, lied to “the public”, tried to keep important information out of the law courts, was all down to their fear of “public opinion”, fear of being found out and forced to resign or, worse, being voted out of office. That this should be the case brings out an interesting conjunction of the personal and the political—which the ministers concerned, along with their colleagues and supporters, have tried to erase. They have tried to hide the personal dimension under the political, claiming that they felt secrecy was necessary' to safeguard jobs in the armaments industry, while in fact they were more concerned with safeguarding their own careers and their own power, which brings us nicely to the crux of the issue at hand.
Ministerial responsibility
The whole issue of ministerial responsibility and ministerial deceit is one of personal ethics dressed up as politics. Like most contemporary' mainstream “politics” it is really soap opera, drawing everybody’s attention to particular characters and focusing on issues of individual hypocrisy or corruption (it’s not entirely fortuitous that Scott’s investigations have twice during February been dramatised on television). There's little doubt that many of the characters involved in this little drama were (and are) hypocritical and corrupt, or at least incompetent, but that’s not the point, it’s only the point focused on by both the Opposition parties and by the media. Politicians are by definition incapable of mastering events whatever their personal attributes may be; they have always been so to some extent under capitalism, forced to react to the markets and the requirements of profit and capital. These days they are even less able to control the system they support than they have been in the past, due to modern information technologies and the speed at which information can travel, allowing capital and the markets to evade and pre-empt their every' attempt at control. Politicians are, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has put it, “structurally incompetent”; to paraphrase Derrida, while they present themselves as political actors they are no more than TV actors. And they know it; they are, therefore, not only structurally incompetent, they are also structurally hypocritical. This is not to say that those involved are not responsible; they support capitalism after all, quite apart from the fact that they are, in any case, personally corrupt liars and arrogant hypocrites. The point is that this should only be of marginal interest, instead of being, as it is, the main focus of attention.
There is a very serious political dimension here which actually sheds some light on the complex but indissoluble links between war and armaments and the very existence of capitalism itself. The concentration by the media on ministerial ethics specifically marginalises the fact that this issue is about the sale of armaments, about, by extension, war and death. Even when this is considered, media concern, as well as the concern of the Opposition parties, is focused on the fact that the armaments were being sold to Iraq. The demonisation of a particular national leader by the Western ruling class could, ironically, lead to the downfall of some of the very people who have encouraged this demonisation. This concern with Iraq, though, is still without any really serious point. Saddam Hussein is undoubtedly a tyrant; but so was Somoza of Nicaragua and Pinochet of Chile, to name only two, who were supported by the Western so-called “liberal democracies”. All this selective support and demonisation is itself simply a smokescreen for the way in which war and capitalism feed off each other, the fact that the gulf war was fought for economic reasons, the fact that all the major industrialised states produce and sell arms; that the arms trade is the height of modern capitalism.
Scarce material resources
War is largely a result of scarcity; however the causes of war are dressed up ideologically, war is a more-or-less direct result of the struggles of particular peoples for a greater share of scarce material resources, though down through history this has had less and less actual effect on the lives of ordinary people as the minority ruling classes have taken more of those resources for themselves. In pre-capitalist societies, though, there was at least a true scarcity which led inevitably to conflict. Under the capitalist mode of production on the other hand, scarcity is artificially created by the system itself even as it develops the productive potential for its eradication. Capitalism requires competition for its existence and competition requires scarcity ; and it should be noted that war itself is simply a form of competition on a particularly large and deadly scale. Scarcity and competition are vital to capitalism, and scarcity and competition are also the necessary pre-conditions for inevitable war.
War itself, in its turn, creates further massive conditions of scarcity through the damage it inflicts and the consequent need to rebuild. The arms themselves are also obviously a paradigm of material scarcity; they can only be used once and require immediate replacement. The armaments market is highly competitive and there is an enormous amount of money to be made; whichever way you look at it, there is always a lot of money to be made from war, which is why, beneath all the moral platitudes, capitalism loves it. It has nothing to do with which party is in office; Labour supported the Americans in Vietnam and the recent Australian Labor government supplied and supported the raping, torturing aggressors in East Timor. Particular governments, in the final analysis, are neither here nor there. Capitalism itself produces greed, corruption and war through the artificial production of scarcity and the exploitation for its own ends of the absurd quasi-mystical ideologies of nationalism. The only way to end war and the manufacture of arms is to end capitalism, world-wide; to abolish the profit system and abolish states and borders. The only really worthwhile use of parliaments is to bring a democratic end, once-and-for-all, to the system that makes them otherwise no more then TV studios for tedious and absurdly repetitive “dramas”.
Jonathan Clay
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