Sting in the Tail: None So Blind (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

None So Blind

Whenever outbreaks of racial, ethnic or religious intolerance occurred in America or Western Europe, supporters of the "communist" dictatorships would claim that none of these evils could happen in "the socialist countries" because their governments, through education, had eradicated them.

These governments had, after all, exclusive use of the education system and the media for decades, so surely this, together with their avowed opposition to such evils, should have succeeded in at least reducing them.

Every day we can see the awful reality: anti-semitism, national, ethnic and religious hatreds are rife in all the so-called "socialist countries" and have even produced minor wars in some of them.

Of course the dictatorships had never even tried to remove the old divisions but had merely kept the lid on them. These divisions persist because the conditions which spawned them — ignorance, poverty and insecurity — remain, and this was something those supporters of the state capitalist dictatorships couldn't or wouldn't see.

Noble Toady

Lord Woodrow Wyatt has complained in the House of Lords about political bias by "left-wing" TV programme makers.

But what about Tory Was in the press? As was pointed out in the same debate, Rupert Murdoch owns 35% of the national press and no one can say his papers aren't biased.

Wyatt didn't complain about THAT because, you see, he is a columnist (The Voice of the People) in the News of the World which is owned by — Rupert Murdoch!

Ridiculous Ridley

The political demise of Nicholas Ridley, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, will leave all socialists dry eyed. He was the usual brand of arrogant Tory so beloved of the Prime Minister. His political departure, seen from the perspective of a socialist, is of no importance whatsoever to the working class.

What is of interest to socialists in the Ridley resignation is the background which led to it. Mr. Ridley, after what would appear to have been too good a lunch, spouted his ridiculous nonsense Into the tape recorder of the editor of The Spectator.

Even by arrogant Tory standards these were far from diplomatic musings:

This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted. This risked takeover by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, Is absolutely intolerable . . . I'm not against giving up sovereignty on principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give in to Adolf Hitler.

To the suggestion of The Spectator that if these were his views would he consider resignation he replied:

I've been in office for 14 years. I've been elected to parliament six times. I’m still at the top of the political tree, and I'm not done yet.

It was once said by another political trickster that "A week is a long time In politics." And it has been proved to be the case for Mr. Ridley. His political tree has been chopped down, and politically he is most definitely done.

Society in Conflict

Good news for some in capitalism is usually bad news for others and we are reminded of this by ICI's decision to close its loss-making fertiliser business.

For example, as fertilisers have lost £39 million in the last four years, then ICI's shareholders can hope for bigger dividends in future.

Against that are the 640 workers who will lose their jobs. The "greens" will be happy as ICI's inorganic fertilisers are a major source of water pollution. But if any "greens" are among the sacked workers then they will hardly know whether to laugh or cry.

Incidentally, one of ICI's reasons for the closure, that farmers are simply using less fertiliser, greatly pleased one newspaper:

There can be few things more nonsensical than one farmer ladling fertiliser onto a field while the farmer next door is being paid a set-aside grant by the EEC to grow nothing.

(The Guardian 26 July)

We can thank The Guardian for unwittingly revealing another feature of capitalism — its anarchy of production.

Roads to Ruin

Socialists are always showing that capitalism is a wasteful, inefficient social system. A recent report in The Independent 16 August Illustrates our point very well.

A committee of MPs reporting to the Department of Transport on the state of Britain's roads was scathing on the constant need for these roads to be repaired.

Robert Sheldon, Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and chairman of the committee, said: "The Romans built roads that lasted thousands of years. We build our roads and eight years later we have to start repairing them."

The construction of these roads goes out to tender and the cheapest quote gets the job. The construction companies all have shareholders who are only interested in one thing — profit. So it does not take a financial wizard to appreciate that like all profit-making businesses every effort will be made to cut costs.

The cheapest materials possible will be used. In order to cut labour costs all sorts of schemes will be devised to speed up the work, inevitably producing a sub-standard job.

The extent of this shoddy production is reflected in the staggering costs of repairs:

More than £1 billion a year is spent building new motorways, trunk roads and bridges. The report said the National Audit Office had identified 210 cases of premature defects, with total repair costs of £262 million.

In defending this waste of human effort Christopher Chope, Road and Transport Minister, inadvertently revealed the cause of the whole sorry mess.

You could build all the roads so that they would not need repairs for 60 years, but the cost would be so great it probably would not represent good value.

This type of reasoning is typical of the capitalist system. Motor cars are built that only last a few years, car ferries operate that turn turtle in the English Channel, aircraft are flying with fire hazardous fittings that could be replaced by safer materials. The catalogue is a long, depressing and often tragic one.

The Lively Corpse

Someone once wrote a blood-curling story about a murderer who couldn't get rid of the body. He burned it in a furnace, submerged it in acid, dumped it in a lake, cut it into pieces, but the corpse always returned. The murderer finally gave up and turned himself in after waking up one morning to find the thing in bed with him.

This tale reminds us of the exasperating resilience of something else that will not lie down — the class struggle.

Academics and politicians are forever assuring us that it is dead and yet it constantly turns up all over the world in the form of, for example, strikes and lock-outs.

Despite repressive laws and awesome state power ranged against them, workers have created trade unions in South Africa, Eastern Europe, South Korea, etc.

As long as capital and wage-labour exist then so must the class struggle and this is something which all those who would bury it cannot change.