At Home
The crisis in the shipyards of the Upper Clyde group showed capitalism, and its apologists, at their most typical. The crisis came not for any lack of skill or materials or need; it came simply because the yards cannot fulfill the basic capitalist requirement that they operate at a profit. In that situation UCS may well have to shut down, no matter how many ships may be sailing which for one reason or another should be replaced—and no matter how much waste of resources a closure might represent. The Labour Party may howl with rage at the shut down, as they often do when the principles of capitalism which they uphold when in office come into operation when they are in opposition. The Tories say they are applying their policy of making all undertakings stand on their own feet. But if this were to be generally applied, what panic there would be among the parasites of the ruling class !
Among, for example, the royal family who, if required to stand alone on their own feet would quickly collapse into a heap. They have just decided that they can no longer stagger along on the pittance of the few hundred thousands they get each year, even if this does supplement the income from their massive private wealth. Workers whose lives are given up to the toil which produces all this opulence by the side of indescribable misery should not be deceived into thinking that what the press called the royal “wage” claim makes the queen and her hangers-on anything other than the highest, the most publicised and among the richest, of the capitalist class.
To the members of that class, problems like rising prices, for example, are seen as if through the other end of the telescope from the one to which workers’ eyes are glued. We do not need the Labour Party to remind us that the Tories promised to end this problem, as Labour themselves promised. Now, the election pledges are as usual being forgotten, if sometimes they are remembered when something happens like Minister of Agriculture Prior’s gaffe. Perhaps he was trying the unusual course of trying to be honest; or perhaps he is just a fool; or are the Tories playing the excessively simple game of admitting, quickly and in words which all can understand, that they cannot control capitalism? Whichever it is, the working class could do themselves a good turn by undestanding.
Politics
It seems that the government will not have an easy ride into the Common Market, whatever happens at the negotiations. In this country there is a strengthening lobby which is pledged to fight the British entry. One theme which this lobby is playing is the fact that the people have not been consulted on the issue. This is not, of course, entirely true; anyone who voted for either Labour or Tory in the last election thinking that he was opposing Britain joining the EEC must have a serious mental blockage. More to the point, when were the people ever consulted on this kind of issue? When was there a referendum on a declaration of war? When did we have the chance to vote on issues like racist immigration Bills? Anti-trade union laws? So why make an exception over the Common Market? Could it be that the Labour Party are seeing in the issue the chance to grab quite a few votes and know that a middle line policy will grab them all the more and all the quicker? It is not unknown for issues like the Common Market to be obscured by a propaganda smokescreen behind which a capitalist party makes its attack. And the talk about a referendum is no more than a smokescreen put out to hide the essential fact that worker have no interests in the issue; whether Britain goes in or not will have no fundamental effect on our standing as workers.
Abroad
How romantic, how thrilling, that the Russians have an orbiting space station where they can grow things and watch the weather and the vegetation and so on down on earth! What brave men are their astronauts, to whizz up into space and start crawling about from one ship to another just so that they can grow those things and watch all the others! What clever scientists, to think it all up and then design all the ships and the equipment! Perhaps there will still be some of the thrills and the romance left, when it becomes obvious that the stations (there will assuredly be more of them) are also being used, probably primarily, for purposes connected with the war machines of the space powers. The world was similarly thrilled when man first flew and we all know where that landed us. Space travel, and the courage and ability which goes into it, shows again what human beings could do to improve our environment —and how capitalism corrupts it all.
What capitalism does is being witnessed in India and East Pakistan, where disease follows war follows flood and will probably be followed by yet more horrible disaster. It is now coming out, that places like East Pakistan have for a long time been in a turmoil of bloodshed, with political murders so frequent that they hardly make the news. Other murders, of course, are even less like to be noticed. Across the border in Calcutta there is a similar story. It is likely now that this already desperate situation will explode into something even more horrifying. The answer which capitalism has to this is to appeal for charity and to represent the affair as a regrettable accident. We should remember the original motives for conquering the Indian continent, and for keeping it in the economic state it was kept in for so long, and then for giving it its “independence” in the way it was. In this perspective the horror of East Pakistan becomes more logical—and even more horrible.
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