Missing millions (1984)

From the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do we need the capitalists of the world? On this important question there is a mixed message from the media. At one time their hungrily snapping camera operators show the rich sporting on the ski slopes or lounging on tropical beaches, the very picture of idleness and social redundancy. At another their wheedling writers tell us that the rich are essential to the smooth, productive operation of modern society. It is, they assure us, something to do with the capitalists so generously investing their wealth so that the rest of us can be employed. Unless they are allowed to exploit us to their own huge advantage then we shall all be out of work and civilisation as we know it will disintegrate.

Some light was thrown on this popular theory by the recent affair of Reuters and the Press Association. The PA—the British national news agency—was set up in 1868 and as an organisation it took a shareholding in Reuters. When Reuters was recently floated on the Stock Exchange it emerged that many of the shareholders in PA, the price of whose shares had climbed steeply, could not be found. This was no trifling matter for the missing shareholders were worth something like £9 million.

This started an excited search and a spate of frantic claims by fortune hunters, led by the chief researcher of Burke's Peerage, where they know a thing or two about inherited wealth, the lives and luxuries of the parasite class in society and the importance, if you are a member of that class, of knowing who your ancestors were.

Amid all this excitement, an essential fact was overlooked. For all this time, the Press Association and Reuters have been operating without any involvement by the missing shareholders and without these lucky people even being aware that they have an interest in the company. There is no evidence that the work of the agencies suffered thereby; the news and the information flowed in and out. was edited and circulated without anyone feeling under any handicap.

The reason — which has been known to socialists for a long time — is that such work is done by the working class, who are not just the exploited and repressed section of society but also the useful, productive class. Wealth, in all its forms, can be produced by human beings without the ludicrously needless intervention of the priority that it must result in a profit for the owning minority. The shareholding class are redundant in any social sense; a sane society will be able to run efficiently and easily without them.

Do we need the capitalists of the world? We have news for you . . .