Left-right to nowhere
In China the Gang of Four have just been tried for being too extreme. At the Special Labour Party conference in Wembley the Gang of Three looked extremely moderate while Hattersley looked moderately moderate and Benn looked moderately extreme and most people felt extremely confused and moderately indifferent. Meanwhile we are told that Roy Jenkins is Left of Centre, James Prior is Right of Centre, David Steel is Dead Centre and the Socialist Workers’ Party and the National Front so extremely Left and Right that they meet at weekends to throw stones at each other. Is this really what politics is all about?
Moderate and extreme are adjectives and without a noun they have no more meaning than very or rather. The unmentioned map to which all of these descriptions refer is the capitalist social order. Those to the Right want to run capitalism a certain way and those to the Left support different policies. But both are policies for the same system. Sometimes one policy is adopted by a government to the virtual exclusion of alternative policies and then it is called Extremism. When various types of policy are mixed together in one general government policy, as is usually the case, it is called Moderation. But whether Left, Right, Centre, Moderate or Extreme, they are all policies which represent the social interest of a section, or sections, of the present ruling class who possess their power because of their ownership of the means of life.
Does it make any difference to the majority of us, who are not in the ruling class, whether one government policy or another is pursued? To a limited extent it does, insofar as some policies can be more disastrous than others, but ultimately the overriding principles of the capitalist system are greater than any policies for running it. No policy, of capitalism, can get rid of unemployment or bad housing or war or poverty. This is because the primary law of capitalism is that profits of the few must always come before the needs of the many. As long as the majority of people elect leaders to run this system it will not basically change, whatever the labels of the leaders.
Thatcher’s so-called extreme Right wing approach has clearly failed. So did Heath’s so-called moderate Right wingery. The so-called moderate Left with their objective of the mixed economy has invariably resulted in the same old mixed-up economy. The Communist Party, which some regard as the extreme Left, supports import controls and British withdrawal from the Common Market, as does the National Front, which is generally regarded as extreme Right.
The new rag-bag Centre Party is designed to provide a home for political misfits who have been less successful than they had hoped to be in the other capitalist parties. The new party will continue to churn out the same failed policies in a desperate bid to find an acceptable face for capitalism. Those left in the centre may do alright and be extremely moderate, but still, if they ever obtain power, they will administer the same old vicious, destructive, inhumane system.
Fall in
Restless, paranoid Labour MP Alex Lyon is convinced he has uncovered a government scheme to push unemployed youths into military training in uniform. Official assurances on the matter are airily unreassuring. An Unemployment Discipline Expert writes: Cadjoling unemployed people into uniform for a bit of square bashing, bayonet practice or strike breaking (or Coercus Bellicosus as we experts call it) is not generally harmful although it should only be used under the supervision of an expert. There are quite a few pitfalls which may trap the unwary.
To begin with, a few trouble makers may ask why we stop at unemployed youth. What is wrong with recruiting anyone who is not working—pensioners, hospital patients, even dead people (before they are buried, of course). The problem, as I often say to my clients, has to be one of recognition. Without getting bogged down in all that university professor’s jargon, we have to be careful about our definitions. Some descriptions of the unemployed might include the royal family, the Vesteys, Roddy Llewellyn . . .
Then what about your honest-to-goodness, backbone-of-Britain sergeant major? When I was in the mob (as we squaddies used to call it) they wouldn’t have wanted Roddy Llewellyn out on their Barrack Square. So you see we experts have to.be very careful.
Why only the other day one of my clients, who was in need of a bit of advice about discipline for his invalid grandmother, asked me whether I didn’t think the Army was unemployed in the sense that they never actually produce anything. Shouldn’t they, he asked, be pressed into a super Army for unemployed Army people?
Well being an expert it didn’t take me long to point out that with all their destructive power the armed forces create lots of jobs for the building trade, although they do a bit of no good for the demolition contractors. Then what about the help they give to the unemployed problem by killing off all those actual or potential dole-drawers?
We may not yet have all the answers but I’m sure our boys in the back room have something sensational cooking up in all those test tubes and pipettes; they’ll find a solution in no time.
Reagan’s new role
Ronald Reagan won the Presidency on promises, implied or explicit, that he, who was once one of the nice guys of Hollywood, was going to get pretty nasty with quite a few people like the Iranians and the Russians. This got a lot of American workers excited enough to vote for Reagan. The new President needed a few days to recover from his sumptuous inaugural junketings and since then the world has waited with, as they say. bated breath for him to loose off America’s nuclear arsenal in all directions.
The fear—or, for quite a few American voters, the hope—that he will do so is founded in the assumption that politicians fulfil the promises they were elected on. Sometimes this is a matter of saying they will conform to a political character- Reagan’s tough guy, Kennedy’s cultured “liberalism”, Johnson’s comprehensive efficiency. But Johnson ended his one full term in chaos, with the demonstrators baying in the streets in protest at the seemingly endless bloodletting of Vietnam and the other excesses of Johnson’s government.
And the humane, liberal Kennedy was responsible for the Bay of Pigs, and later the ultimatum to Russia over Cuba, which almost lossed off those missiles nearly twenty years before Reagan came into the White House. In practise politicians do not just fail to keep their promises. Often they pursue a course which is the very opposite of what they seemed to represent w'hen they were campaigning for votes.
Thus de Gaulle did not after all crush the FLN in Algeria but did a deal with them which allowed them to take over the country. Thus Macmillan did not batter down the independence movements in the old British colonies in Africa but lubricated the processes of their breaking away from British rule. And thus Reagan, the professed warmonger, faced with the immediate emergencies of capitalism, may yet disappoint his supporters.
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