Sting in the Tail: Going Legit (1991)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Going Legit

The Camorra of Naples now rivals the Sicilian Mafia In wealth and power.

Now their huge profits from drugs, smuggling and extortion are being invested in banking, industry, agriculture, etc., to the point where -

. . . their legal income is now greater than their illegal one.

The Guardian 25 July

This move away from illegal to legal activities is nothing new. Many of Britain’s "noblest" families began just like the Camorra and made their fortunes from land-theft, banditry and piracy. For example, Lord Home, Tory Prime Minister in 1963-4, proudly boasted that his ancestors had been border cattle thieves.

These earlier bandits have long since legitimised their operations and now legally plunder the working class through the wages system. The Camorra is only following in their footsteps.

Showing by Example

The Socialist Workers Party condemns those Labour councils which make economies by sacking workers.

It was Liverpool council's turn in Socialist Worker 27 July -

City Treasurer Phil Kelly unveiled plans which will mean real anguish for thousands of people.

To close a £10 million deficit, the council wants to push through another 155 compulsory redundancies In addition to the 160 already announced and the 460 resulting from the bins service privatisation.

The SWP insists that under no circumstances should the workers be sacked, but back in 1975 the SWP (then called The International Socialists) had to make economies. Its national committee reported that -

. . . extra efficiency will not save enough money so we considered the running of all the departments to see if they could possibly function on less workers. We decided that two should go from the printshop, one from Socialist Worker, and 2.5 from admin.

Dally Telegraph 13 March 1975

So the SWP's solution was exactly the same as the councils they condemn. A clear case of the Trotskyist pot calling the Labour kettle black.

Labour's "Socialists"

John Molyneux's column in Socialist Worker is titled "Teach Yourself Marxism" although anytime Scorpion has read it there has never been anything about Marxism in it.

That is until the issue dated 27 July when we read that Marx stood for "smashing the capitalist state". In fact he did stand for the abolition of the state but not for attacking it head on. No evidence for this "smashing" was given but it's a bit rich when someone who can write such nonsense urges anyone else to "Teach Yourself Marxism".

But Molyneux's column was mainly about the agonising time "socialists" are having in "Kinnock's Labour Party".

Who are these "socialists"and what do they get up to in an anti-socialist party? Molyneux tells us they are, among other things, "usually the most energetic canvassers and recruiters".

So here are "socialists" who devote much of their political activity to peddling Labour Party policies to workers; policies which are aimed solely at propping-up British capitalism. Some "socialists" these!

Crime and Punishment

As newspapers reveal some of the skullduggery that goes on The City, where million pound frauds are commonplace It is interesting to compare the fate in the courts of those committing these frauds with that of the working class who have been at the fiddle.

A recent example was reported in Glasgow in the local Evening Times (7 August) -

A man who stole his sister's DSS giro and cashed it has been jailed for six months . . .  He also admitted cashing it at Tormusk Post Office, Castlemilk and defrauding the DSS of £37.05.

Six months in nick for stealing £37.05! At that rate of punishment how long would those city-slickers spend in jail for their muti-million pound scams? There is a lot of truth in the old saying — never steal anything small!

Housing — the Facts

Amidst all the nonsense of the reformist political parties and their practical plans to deal with the "housing problem" it is interesting to note some of the hard facts about the so-called "housing problem". A recent issue of The Guardian provided some useful information about the present position -

• 169,000 households are classed as homeless in Britain this year.
• Between 30,000 and 40,000 people around the country are believed to sleep rough from time to time. About 5,000 sleep out in London each night.
• There are 700,000 empty homes in the country, many awaiting repair; 100,000 are owned by councils, 600,000 by private landlords.

This ghastly situation is made all the more horrendous when you realise that there is no "housing problem" only a poverty problem. One that will last as long as we have wealth produced to realise a profit instead of the socialist society where everything, including housing, will be produced to satisfy human need.

Housing — More Facts

In case anyone imagines that a cause of the "housing problem" is a physical shortage of the ability to build houses we would point out a report in The Times (5 August) -

A quarter of a million construction workers are likely to lose their jobs during the recession, according to forecasts from the Building Employers Confederation...

Using official statistics, the BEC calculates that 150,000 construction jobs have been lost since the middle of last year. The federation predicts a further 100,000 will be lost by the middle of next year.

So there you have it — 160,000 homeless households, hundreds of thousands of houses needing repairs; and at the same time a quarter of a million construction workers thrown out of a job. But that is typical of capitalism — the economics of the madhouse.

The Pope Knows It!

The notion that state interference in the day to day running of capitalism has something to do with socialism is more and more being discredited. The events in Russia and Eastern Europe are glaring examples of this but now this fallacy has been so well exposed that even the Pope knows it now.

Pope John Paul II's latest encyclical Centesimus Annus commenting on the idea that government Intervention in the market system is socialism states:

In the struggle against such a system, what is being proposed as an alternative is not the socialist system, which in fact turns out to be state capitalism . . .