Keeping cool in the space age
The fabulous achievement of Luna 9 was bound to cause a lot of excitement. But when everyone about you is losing their heads it is, as we know, a sound idea to keep calm.
What does a long, cool look at space flight reveal?
In the first place, it speaks volumes that with a mass of unsolved problems like hunger, crime, bad housing and war plaguing us on earth, capitalism spends such enormous efforts on investigating other worlds.
This is not an objection to space flights on moral grounds; there is no logical reason to expect capitalism suddenly to start putting human welfare before its own interests.
Space investigation is given a high priority by the world’s two great powers and it is not difficult to see why this is so.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union make no secret of the fact that their space programmes are an essential part of their military effort, yielding valuable information on guiding systems and aiming techniques for long range missiles.
Already the information is being used for military purposes; both powers have observation vehicles in orbit above us and the Americans have actually publicised their plans for a military space laboratory to be sent up in the near future.
But even if we make the effort to ignore this consideration and assume that the exploration of space is purely a matter of scientific investigation, there is still the question of what the world working class can hope to gain from it all.
Have the conditions of any worker, anywhere, improved—indeed, can they hope to improve—as a result of the space flights, the probes into the moon, the dare-devil acts of space walking and the rest? The answer is clearly no.
Who, then, stands to gain? Even at the present, new industries have arisen as a result of space flights, and established ones have done their best to get in on it. (The Daily Express, whose equipment helped to receive the moon pictures from Luna 9 made some quick advertisements out of it)
Presumably, other new industries will rise in the future, employing and. exploiting their workers in their efforts to make profit from the romantic business of space travel.
Eager investors will want to get in on this. Perhaps there will be a Unit Trust which deals in space shares.
In short, all capitalism’s normal standards of commerce and profitability will be applied to the Space Age. The knowledge which the flights yield will be used, as all such knowledge has been in the past, for the benefit of the ruling class —to improve the returns on their capital, to protect their interests, to establish them in new markets.
Perhaps, in the end, to help them blast their rivals out of the field—or the sky or whatever.
Man’s probing into space is only the latest of his victories over his environment, and the same lesson applies to it as to the others. Capitalism is the cause of the problems of modern society and until it is ended man’s achievements— his skill, his knowledge, his courage- will be misused and perverted.
Rail strike and the incomes policy
It would be difficult to say whether the last minute calling off of the rail strike was more of a relief to the Government or to the National Union of Railwaymen.
From the word go, the threatened strike was given a dramatic build-up; expressions like ’’last ditch” and ’’breaking point” cannot have been given so thorough an airing in the press for a long time.
The railwaymen were assailed from all sides. Even papers like The Guardian and the Daily Mirror, which in the past have been sympathetic to them, were urging the strikers to have what they called common-sense.
It was, apparently, a time fraught with danger for us all. If the railwaymen got their way the Government’s Prices and Incomes Policy would collapse and ruin, which anyway has never stopped hanging over us, would descend.
But it was no secret that the Incomes Policy was already a flop. Sooner or later then the Government had either to abandon it openly or provoke a head-on clash with a big union.
The NUR was predictably resentful at being awarded the part of keystone in George Brown’s policy, although they really had little to complain about, they, after all, support the Labour Government and they also support its Incomes Policy.
The trouble was the usual one, of getting a union which accepts wage restraint in principle to apply it to its own members in practice. The NUR was all for the Incomes Policy, but did not want to be the one to start it.
Indeed, who is going to volunteer for this role? Who will choose to ignore the effects of rising prices, who will forego a chance to improve their conditions, who can escape the class struggle?
So far, the answer is—nobody. The railwaymen are only the latest in a long queue of those who have campaigned for higher wages since the Labour Government came to power. Some have got it without resorting to anything as vulgar as a strike threat; the judges, high rank Civil Servants and members of the Armed Forces have all been given more than the Incomes Policy allowed them.
And, of course, there was the case of the Members of Parliament and the Ministers who, being in the happy situation of being able to give themselves a rise, agreed soon after Mr. Wilson took over that they should all have one.
Yet Ministers and M.P.s are the very people who are urging the rest of us to hold back on our claims. It is by no means unreasonable to expect that, if the Incomes Policy had to be started somewhere, it should have been in the House of Commons.
But the Members, when they were deciding that they should have a rise, used exactly the same sort of arguments as any trade union. They said they were overworked, that they could not make ends meet, that the House was not attracting the best sort of Member because they could get better money outside.
So the Incomes Policy, at least on the surface, is saved and staggers on to fight another day. Mr. Wilson has once more stood, like a knight in shining armour, between us and disaster—and once more has gained a lot of political advantages out of it, especially over George Brown, who was shown up publicly as unable to pull off something which Wilson could do.
Mr. Wilson has scored another palpable hit. But there is no denying the class struggle of capitalism. There will be other battles, and other strikes, and more undercover deals to settle them.
All right for some
It was most inconsiderate of the North Vietnamese Government; they might have guessed the effect it would have. True, they did their best to rectify the matter but in future they really must be more careful.
It happened on the 8th February last and it was started by a statement from the North Vietnamese Consulate in Delhi that President Ho Chi Minh had asked India's help in putting out peace feelers over Vietnam.
The Consulate quickly pointed out that the same request had been sent, presumably as a matter of routine, to several other governments, most of whom had dismissed it as the customary meaningless public relations stuff.
But before anyone had realised this a minor wave of panic hit Wall Street, where some investors were appalled by the prospect that peace would actually break out in Vietnam.
What would happen in such a situation to all that money invested in the aerospace and defence industries? When a war is hot and the killing fast, the sun shines on these investments. But the terrible prospect of peace brings dark and heavy clouds.
Thus it was that when some idiot in Delhi got the wrong end of the stick, and when the information was passed on, Wall Street's war stocks took a tumble. It took the later explanation from the North Vietnamese to put the matter right
Then Wall Street recovered. All the war investors there, who stay so courageously out of the firing line, made good their losses and that little corner of capitalism went merrily on. Of course in Vietnam the killing and the suffering continued, but what was that against the averting of a crisis on Wall Street?
This is all reminiscent of the 1951 slump in business in the United States and England, which was caused by the cancellation of government contracts no longer needed after the end of the Korean War.
It goes to show that not only does capitalism cause modern war but it also makes a business out of it—a business with its salesmen, its stocks and shares and its investors.
And let us not forget that the man who does well out of war investments, the man who gets a nice profit from putting his money in bombs and bullets, in fear and destruction, is that thing so beloved of capitalism — a Successful, Patriotic Business Man.
Mr Heath makes a discovery
Mr. Edward Heath, who fought his way up from the world-famous slums of Broadstairs through Oxford University to become (he hopes) the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, has recently made a staggering discovery.
Of course, since he became Tory leader Mr. Heath's publicity boys have been making sure that we discovered one or two things about him.
He's a bachelor. Lives in a flat in Albany, which is not one of those places you get into because you have enough points in the council housing list.
He plays the piano. And the organ. And he likes to conduct choirs dressed up (Mr. Heath, not the choir) in a big yellow sweater.
All of this should prove to us that Mr. Heath is a Man Of The People. And in case there are any doubters on this score, the leader himself has recently been probing around the People; that is how he made his staggering discovery.
There are far too many under privileged people in Britain. (Mr. Heath’s words, not ours—he said them at Birmingham last month.) Not only that; a fearless searcher after Truth like Ted Heath has more to reveal. There are also, he said, places which are “. . . breeding grounds of exceptional misery, poverty and crime; bad housing, oversized classes and rootlessness."
Now none of Mr. Heath’s public relations boys has ever issued a hand-out telling us that he suffers from a bad memory. But he seems to have forgotten that it was only two short years ago that he was an important member of a Conservative Government which was asking us to put them back into power because under them we “never had it so good."
And if Mr. Heath has forgotten this, what hope is there that he will remember the promises he is making now, to “. . . put an end to poverty and hardship in this country once and for all . . ."? Or that especially moving bit about old age pensioners “. . . a bit of extra tea to entertain a friend . . .”?
Perhaps the safest thing to assume is that the Tories do not expect this sort of drivel to be taken seriously; perhaps they think that in this time of pre-election fever anything goes. (A couple of days after his Birmingham speech, Mr. Heath was challenging the Government to let the electorate decide . . which party most has the welfare of the needy at heart”)
But if the Conservatives do mean it to be taken seriously—and if that is how the electorate take it — then there is clearly no bottom to the depths of political cynicism, and a depressingly dense stratum of working class gullibility to be penetrated.
1 comment:
That's the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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