Accumulate
The chief executive of the Lonrho company, “Tiny” Rowland, has once again demonstrated how wealth is constantly accumulated in the hands of those who already have it. In one week in July, Lonrho’s share price increased from 66p to 83p, and as a result the value of Rowland’s shares increased by £7,600,000 — from £29.2 million to £36.8 million. If one of the workers who produce this wealth were to save £10 out of their weekly wages, it would take 14,615 years to save £7,600,000. Even if somebody on an average wage spent nothing at all. it would still take them 1,826 years to accumulate what Tiny made in a week (The Standard. 7 July).
The point is that fortunes are not made by hard work or thrift, but by persuading others to work hard and be thrifty, with the threat of unemployment if they don’t. Before you can persuade others to work for you and make your fortune, you must possess some capital. But since four-fifths of stocks and shares are held by less than one per cent of the population, most people are condemned to lives of wage-slavery. And what did “Tiny” Rowland do with his little profit? He bought five million more Lonrho shares. His comment on company policy? "We pay a decent dividend because I need the cash” (The Standard, 7 July 1982).
The war over the Falklands caused some embarrassment to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, many of whose members were torn between their supposed opposition to war. and their attachment to the very nationalist ideas which make war possible. In CND magazine Sanity, for example, a letter from several CND members complains about their national executive’s call for a negotiated settlement without recourse to force:
Most of our members arc not pacifists and are not campaigning for complete disarmament . . . CND, in our opinion, should point out that the present crisis illustrates the futility of a defence policy based on nuclear weapons (no. 3, June-July, 1982).
The role of CND, then, is that of a would-be adviser to the British ruling class on the most economically and strategically advisable way of waging “just”, national wars, that is, of killing people. The same issue of Sanity carries three separate letters from sailors who are quite prepared to go anti kill fellow workers in Argentina or anywhere else under orders if it satisfies the commercial interests of British investors, but who would prefer this killing to be done with good old-fashioned "conventional” weapons.
In the war in the Lebanon, the true attitude of organisations like CND is being tested more clearly than ever. Phosphorus bombs and cluster bombs are inflicting the most horrific wounds and fatalities before our very eyes. This is not some potential threat, some apocalyptic Armageddon somewhere in the future. It is happening to people at this moment, and CND has nothing practical to say about it. For one thing, nuclear weapons are not being used. But in any case, in order to deal with war we must understand how it is caused. Socialists are not only opposed to every and any war, on all sides, and whichever weapons are being used. They oppose the present system of society which constantly generates military conflict as a natural extension of the commercial conflict of the market.
Violent means
In the wake of the recent IRA bombings in London and similar terrorist attempts elsewhere, those whose interest is in changing society must make their attitude clear. The bombs in question are planted by organisations whose acceptance of capitalist ideas deprives them of the concept of intelligent persuasion. As nationalists, and sometimes Leninists or anarchists, their concern is not to build up support for changing society democratically and by open and unlimited political discussion. Their vicious and destructive techniques of murdering innocent workers in order to advance capitalist causes, such as the setting up of yet another nation state, are learnt directly from governments. Socialists oppose equally both the official state violence, in which millions can legitimately be killed with highly developed weapons, and their makeshift rivals eager to imitate these techniques. The war in the Lebanon, for all the public outcry against its atrocities, is still illogically seen as somehow more respectable and diplomatic than the campaigns of the IRA. The way to change society is not to let the capitalist system "beat” you by despair or "join” it by compromise of principle. The profit system, with its national boundaries and boundless cynicism, must be opposed at every level, determinedly, politically and with the force of understanding and democracy.
Clifford Slapper
2 comments:
That's the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
P.S. That is all of 1982 now on the blog.
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