In October 1851 the American Journal of Insanity published an article on “A New Form of Insanity":
In Berlin, a curious subject for a thesis has been found by a student in medicine . . . M. Groddeck has discovered a new form of epidemic, whose virus has of late circulated throughout the Continental Nations with a rapidity contrasting strongly with the solemn and stately march of cholera. Its development. indeed, has been all but simultaneous in the great European capitals . . . M. Groddeck's thesis, publicly maintained, is entitled “De morbo democratico . . .": on the disease of democracy, a new form of insanity.
Social conservatives at the time would have been too busy opposing Chartism to be able to read American academic journals. But in 1984 there are still those who cling to the belief that the movement towards economic and social democracy is like an unnatural disease, to be treated with regular doses of patriotic ideology. Britain, we are told, must be democratic, because its trade rival, Russia, is a dictatorship. The reason for this nonsense is that conservatives, in whatever party, are defending the interests of a small group whose privilege depends on democracy being treated as a joke.
What is the basis of present-day society? Government Inland Revenue statistics show that the richest 3.2 per cent in Britain today own 84 per cent of private listed shares, 91 per cent of private companies, and 88 per cent of the land. According to Tory doublethink, this is called a "property-owning democracy". There is a constant conflict of interests between this minority and the vast majority whom they employ to produce profit for them. The minority accumulate all wealth produced over and above the wages and salaries on which workers survive. This paradox of a rift between those who produce wealth and those who possess it brings us to the first quality needed to avoid contracting the disease of democracy: Tory Logic. In 1976, the Director-General of the CBI, Campbell Adamson, was quoted as saying: "We believe that the lower the increase we can give ourselves as a nation next year, the better off we will all be”.
How can it be that “the nation” is better off if we are paid less? Because capitalism is based on a fundamental class division between owners and producers. An employer who spends £100 on materials and machinery in a week, and £100 on a wage to a worker, then accumulates all the surplus value that is produced. By mid-week, the worker has created £200 worth of saleable commodities, thus covering the employer’s costs. But the worker must continue, and all that is created during the rest of the week is surplus value, which serves to increase the capital of the capitalist class. This is the legalised robbery on which present-day society is based. For example, in the British Oxygen Company sixty-three people hold between them 155 million shares. In 1981 the average “value added", or wealth created, by each worker in that company was about £10,000: more than twice the average wage.
The talk of democratic rights in Britain means little more than that we delicately forge for ourselves the very chains that bind us. Thousands of old people every winter in Britain have the democratic right to die of hypothermia because they cannot afford to both eat and keep warm: millions of workers have been democratically ordered to stop producing useful things because those who own the productive machinery are experiencing one of their periodic slumps in profit . . . And there is no democracy involved in the terror of war which now confronts the world as a result of competition over the world market. There is nothing democratic about the Home Office Circular No. ES 8/1976 (released under Labour and endorsed by the Conservatives) on the aftermath of a nuclear war:
District and borough London controllers should assume that one of the priority tasks for their staff . . . would be to collect and cremate or inter human remains in mass graves . . . there would still be a problem of several weeks, and perhaps months, of an above average rate of dying from disease and radiation effects. Nevertheless, a return to the pre-attack formalities should be the objective in the longer term.
And yet it is those very “pre-attack formalities”, the nature of the present social order, which would have been responsible for such a nuclear war in the first place.
Market magic?
What, then, is the sanity praised by defenders of the global profit system? Adam Smith’s magical “invisible hand” of market forces is now somewhat different from what it was in the eighteenth century. Markets today are no longer small, local, or self-contained but international. The buying and selling system has come to dominate the entire world over the past two hundred years. However it is reformed or modified, from the Kremlin to the White House, the market cannot be made to serve real human interests, the needs of humanity as a whole. The only demand which the profit system can ever recognise is that which is backed up by cash. That is why 30 million people starved to death last year, the equivalent of one Hiroshima every other day, one casualty a second, even though the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has shown that the world’s resources, if properly developed, could feed three times the world’s population.
The capitalist slogan is profit before the needs of the majority. In Britain 3,000 people die every year because they lack a kidney machine costing a few thousand pounds, while over £1.9 million is spent every hour on armaments to defend British markets. In a market society, workers themselves are produced as mere value-generating objects. The Which Book of Money calculates that a child costs £32,000 to produce and look after to the age of 18, taking account of the mother’s loss of earnings. Capitalism has to put price-tags on people, from new-born babies to the cards in the windows of employment agencies, selling lives of creative work for a few thousand pounds a year. All human relationships are transformed into exchange transactions, with varying degrees of subtlety. The Schools Council’s latest (and last) report says children in schools are “like shoes or bits of metal, which are inspected at the end of the production line and sometimes rejected as substandard”. The only exception to this is the public schools, so-called because they are private, where most of the products are labelled “success” however stupid they might be. This is because those schools cater for a useless parasite class who have no part in production or distribution except to obstruct it through class ownership.
No amount of political waffle or rhetoric from those who seek to conserve this chaos can hide the real level of discontent which exists in society. The suicide rate in Britain has now increased to 5,000 each year, and is still rising. This indicates only the tip of the iceberg of intense social misery. The religion of nationalism, racism and conservatism, is irrelevant to the millions of workers who are concerned to eradicate that misery through political and social action.
What do socialists want? We want the working class to put the wealth of society, and the machinery for producing that wealth, in the hands of society as a whole. This is the practical alternative to the market system which currently exists throughout the world. Where people are in need of housing, socialist society will re-organise resources to build houses — not for sale and profit but for use. “Insane!" scream the conservatives who defend the capital of the minority. But look at the present “sanity”: human needs are no less now than they were in the sixties, and yet there has been a massive reduction in the production levels of most major industries, in response to the dictates of profit and the market.
There is only one alternative to the fatal destructiveness of competition, and that is the creativeness of co-operation. The establishment of a system of production solely to satisfy human needs across the globe, rather than for profitable sales in the world market, is more urgently needed than ever. Democratic control of society will be the culmination of a long history of class conflict and will be able to resolve all the contradictions which arise out of the class division in society. It is in the interests of workers everywhere to dismiss the complacent. flippant cries of panic coming from those who are either rich enough or, more likely, sick enough, to want to conserve a “civilisation” founded on poverty, violence and war. The profit system can only offer us prolonged frustration, interrupted by the occasional hysteria of mass slaughter, when wars are fought over the spoils of international capital.
Common ownership of the world’s resources will represent the most compelling and exciting step humanity has taken. To hold back that step is to invite the trade cycle to dominate our lives, imposing its alien forces and needs on the daily lives of the entire population. When you next hear somebody trying to defend the profit system, remember the theory of M. Groddeck, quoted at the beginning of this article, about a new form of insanity. Because when you hear the political rhetoric which praises the magic of market forces, with all references to the starvation and destruction which are produced by those forces neatly edited out, you might just feel tempted to contract the disease of democracy and to stand for the sane alternative.
Clifford Slapper
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