We live today in a world of waste—a ludicrous waste of buying and selling; a criminal waste of war and preparations for war; a useless waste of ticket clipping, accounting, form-filling.
Only now and then does the utter stupidity of the whole futile business pull us up short and make us see things as if for the first time. We stand amazed at the way human beings can go on putting up with such a crazy world, so out of keeping with its real needs and interests.
When more than half the population of the world are going hungry and destitute, the British government will spend something like £2,000 million this year on what it likes to call “defence.” The United States will spend more than ten times as much to the same end and no doubt the Russians will be doing the same.
Every country in the world reserves up to one-tenth of its total national wealth in preparing for war. Some of the weapons they make are obsolete before they actually begin to leave the factories, others even before they are off the drawing board. Many more are scrapped after they have seen only a few months service.
Probably no one will ever know the full amount that has been spent by this country on its atomic programme, and the expenditure by other countries is equally shrouded in secrecy. That the sums are vast is certain.
When the Americans launched Colonel Glenn into space, it cost the staggering sum of £150 million. Britain has spent the better half of £1,000 million so far on rocket missiles. Even greater sums have probably been spent by the Russians, yet Kruschev told the Russian workers only a little while ago that he hoped that by 1980 every Russian would be able to eat an egg a day !
We are so bemused by governments talking in these astronomical figures that they lose all significance. It takes a conscious effort to turn these vast numbers of pounds into such basic things as houses, oil refineries, washing machines, boots and shoes, bread and butter.
In these days when families roam the streets looking for somewhere to live, the productive resources represented by the £150 million spent on the Glenn circus could have built 30,000 houses (and we mean houses, not the glorified chicken coops which currently pass for them). For the same sum five times as many homes could have been provided with good furniture to make them a pleasure to live in. Or perhaps a quarter of a million cars could have been built, or three million refrigerators, or ten million vacuum cleaners, or just a decent pair of shoes for every adult in the country.
Capitalism measures everything in terms of money.
These are the millions, the hundreds of millions, the thousands of millions of pounds, dollars, roubles, francs, marks, yen, and all the other currencies one can think of, that capitalism wastes each year. And this only in misdirected production —we leave out all the other ways in which human labour and resources are uselessly frittered away.
Translate all this vast accumulation of wasted wealth and labour into the worthwhile things of life and into the things that produce them—into houses and brick factories, into electricity and power stations, into food and agricultural machines, into clothes and spinning mills, into coal, oil, roads, railways, and ships.
Stop and think of all this when next you hear some glib politician talking at election time of the millions that are going to be spent on a new rocket, a bigger tank, a faster aeroplane, another atomic test.
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