Death throes?
As the killings in South Africa continue, the question must be — is this apartheid's last spasm of life?
Prime Minister Botha is faced with a massive problem. On the one hand the system of racial discrimination which his government is pledged to maintain and to develop into the establishment of separate states for blacks and whites is clearly in conflict with the demands of South Africa's expanding capitalist economy. A recent report by a quasi-governmental body condemned apartheid as obsolete and warned of the need for the government to act positively in the matter in the near future. According to some reports. Botha himself is aware that this is true.
This reality is slowly being accepted among even sections of the Afrikaaner population, which is a developing section of the capitalist class, impatient with the obstacles which apartheid must place in the way of profitability. Concessions have already been made and more must follow soon; in particular the government may recognise the need for an authentic negotiator for the Africans.
But the very concession of reforms, such as the recognition of black trade unions, the abolition of the ban on inter-racial marriage and sex and the plans to give South African citizenship to the blacks, can itself be a weakening factor for the government. This is all too obvious to some National Party supporters, who view Botha's attempted appeasement of the protest movement with angry contempt and who may turn their support to even more extreme racist policies in an effort to stem the tide of reform. So Botha is trying to ride a tiger — the ferocious animal of racist bigotry which his party whipped into action in the first place.
The situation now is that, paradoxically, many South African capitalists have political views described as to the "left" of the government. For the South African white workers. this is a time for decisions which their bigotry promises to make extremely painful for them. If or perhaps it should be when the black movement wins, a new sort of reality will emerge which in many ways will be as difficult as the present. There will be yet another rising capitalist state in Africa where the ruling class is dominantly black. The workers, whatever their skin colour, will have exchanged one set of exploiters for another.
Vultures
As if they had not suffered enough already, the survivors of the Manchester airport disaster were immediately subjected to the additional stress of the vulture-like attention of eminent persons such as Prince Charles (trying to prove that the royal family are a useful, caring influence in society); Margaret Thatcher (trying to win. or perhaps recover, some votes); and Manchester's Chief Constable James Anderton (of whom the less said the better).
These migrants were soon followed by another species, also seeking to prey on the victims' distress, as lawyers descended on Manchester and set up shop in the hope of handling claims against the airlines. From Philadelphia came Jim Pearce, countered by Manchester's own Rodger Pannone. Generous Malcolm Mason put an advertisement in a Sheffield newspaper inviting reverse-charge calls from anyone willing to let his New York firm handle their claims for damages. Naturally, the lawyers asserted that they were all acting in the victims' best interests; money, they reason, does not bring back the dead but it does an awful lot to soothe the grief of the bereaved. In the form of commission on a successful law suit, it also injects a healthy blush into a balance sheet.
But these were not the only vultures involved in this tragedy. Holiday charter aircraft are crammed with passengers; if this were not so, the operators say, the business would not be profitable — and the trade is savagely competitive. The extra seats mean narrower aisles in the aircraft, which means a more difficult, slower exit in an emergency.
British Airways (the World's Favourite Airline, say Saatchi and Saatchi) have taken the matter further than this. They have blocked some of the exits on some of their aircraft to make way for more seats. Then there is the matter of the materials used in the seating, which in most cases is little better than deadly in a fire. There is a flame-retardant covering available but this at present costs quite a bit more than the present stuff, which brings the airlines up against the demands of profit again.
Finally, the aircraft themselves are worked to their limits, to schedules designed to extract the maximum of profit from them. Servicing intervals must be crammed into these demands. Even after the disaster at Manchester, a representative of the Federal Aviation Administration announced that checks on the suspect engines would have to . . coincide with airline maintenance and flying schedules".
It might be some consolation to the people who died in the fire, and to their families and friends, to know that they died to keep a schedule, to protect the profits of the airlines and the holiday operators. The drive for profit allows no peace for human beings, alive or dead.
On the rampage
It is by now an established routine that after each inner-city riot, such as that last month in Handsworth, the experts run amok brandishing their theories, explanations and remedies.
Some Labour politicians attribute the riots to the effects of unemployment and therefore, by implication, to Thatcher's policies. The left wing put the blame onto heavy-handed police techniques and argue that the remedy is a democratically accountable police force, ignoring the fact that the police are already accountable to the class whose interests they exist to protect — the capitalists.
Blacks are certain that it is all caused by racial discrimination and offer the policy of "smashing" racism, which usually means substituting one type of repression for another, with little to choose between them. The police — and most Tories — insist that the riots are matters of simple criminality, of the perverse drive of a minority to disrupt what is called civilised life. Their remedy, pronounced with varying degrees of ghoulish thrill, is harsher punishment and more of it.
All of these are agreed on one thing. There must be An Enquiry To Get To The Bottom Of It. When the Enquiry has reported and all the experts have read the report we shall be able to re-organise things so that it never happens again.
It is all as if history never happened, as if Handsworth has not already suffered a riot, as if St. Pauls, Brixton, Toxteth are places where peace has reigned undisturbed. Is it really necessary to go through all this agony, just to get a visit from a cabinet minister and the promise of a few new buildings, a few square yards of grassland, a few trees planted?
The flaw which is shared by all the arguments of the "experts" is that they are based on a superficial view of society and its problems. All of them presume that a social system based on the class ownership of the means of life is logical, efficient and pretty well eternal. This might be all very well except that this system must throw up social ailments which will come to some very nasty crises.
Capitalism separates the majority of people from access to the means of life except as employees, workers for a wage. It denies them access to wealth except as buyers; however much we need it we can't get hold of anything without in some way paying for it.
One result of this is that the majority of people are in a state of alienation — from their employment, from their environment, from their human prospects. This alienation is at its most acute where poverty is deepest, in the grimmer places of working-class life such as inner city areas whose grime, slums and apathy are material expressions of frustration.
Capitalism cannot be a society of harmony.
Blogger's Note:
The November 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard carried an article by Ron Cook on the recent riots in Handsworth and, also, his memories of growing up in Handsworth in the 1930s.
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