Sting in the Tail: Timex (1) (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timex (1)

Another expert on capitalist enterprise has bitten the dust. He is Timex president Peter Hall. He resigned his post in June although in May he was telling The Herald that “he wasn't a quitter and he would see the dispute through to a resolution".

At that time he was full of confidence about the future of the Timex factory in Dundee:

Timex has been in Dundee for 50 years and we will he here for at least another 50 years, despite the fact that some people seem not to want us here.

Five weeks after that confident forecast he had resigned and the company announced that the factory would close in December. Just another example of the complete unpredictability of the capitalist system and the “experts'" lack of understanding it.

Timex (2)

When Timex’s owner Fred Olsen told the striking Timex workers that they should “reflect calmly” before rejecting the reduced wages and conditions they had been offered, Willie Leslie, the deputy shop stewards’ convenor, replied angrily:

How dare a man described as one of the richest multi-millionaires in the world tell workers who earned £125 a week that they need to tighten their belts to make sure . . . that the profits continue to roll into the Olsen empire. (Guardian. 5 June).

His anger was a natural reaction but does he think Timex is in business to provide jobs for workers? Its aim must be to maximize profits but the Dundee factory is a loss-maker, and as Peter Hall put it bluntly “we have to turn this place round".

Faced with the resolve of the strikers, Timex will now close the Dundee factory. Is this another defeat for the working class? Maybe, but if this dispute serves as a warning to other employers that there is a limit to what workers will endure then the struggle of the Timex strikers will not have been in vain.

Tinkerbenn

Tony Benn has in the past shown that he has grasped at least some of the Marxist analysis of capitalism.

You would never suspect this from his ridiculously idealistic waffle in the Guardian on 29 June. Writing in anger about the American missile attack on Baghdad he correctly describes this as:

a return to Victorian imperialism with its gun-boat diplomacy, carrying out punitive raids whenever the imperial power wishes to demonstrate its strength and assert its authority in defence of its economic interests in oil and the wealth of the Third World.

And his solution? He tells us “what we need is a real New World Order". No, not the abolition of the social system which produces all this hut merely “a reformed United Nations"! Its domination by the “rich nations" is to he swept away and “replaced by policies that are in accord with the Charter of the UN”.

Benn, like all reformers, really believes that with a bit of tinkering capitalism can exist without the warts which are such a fundamental part of it.

That reserve army

Will Hutton, economic editor of the Guardian, wrote on 22 June:

In the middle of the 20th century Keynesian economics came to the rescue of capitalism and dispelled the Marxist claim that to work it required a reserve army of the mass unemployed.

Marx certainly held that capitalism needed what he called an “industrial reserve army" and explained why in Capital (Volume 1, chapter 25). This army was needed to provide labour for new industries without disrupting old industries which also required it and, of course, to keep down the wages of those in work.

Hutton now cites the growth of unemployment in the EC which is expected to rise to 17 million in 1994 as evidence that Keynes's rescue “has proved only temporary" and concludes:

Thus the current spectre haunting Europe is that Marx has finally been proven right—if wrong on the solution.

Marx’s “solution" to unemployment was nothing less than the establishment of socialism and obviously Hutton doesn't agree with that.

Some celebration

Did you know that the United Nations is celebrating its first International Year for the World's Indigenous People?

Trouble is no-one told the Brazilian gold and tin “wildcat" miners. The Yanomami, an ancient Amazon tribal people, are being wiped out by the “progress" of capitalism's development.

In this column we reported in February 1990 that the Yanomami, who have lived in the area for 40,000 years, had been reduced to 20,000. We now learn (Observer, 20 June) this number is down to 7,500:

In some villages there are no surviving old people and no children under two. Gold miners have shot children out of trees calling them “monkeys”, they have raped women and bombed villages, where they want to mine.

Thus does capitalisms market system “improve" the world. Only the mining companies are celebrating such progress.