Sting in the Tail: An ill wind (1990)

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

An ill wind

As thousands of workers await in fear the outcome of events in the Gulf and the prospect of war appears more and more likely, it is worth noting that these development are not being greeted with universal horror.

Some people are delighted with the war preparations. For instance, according to The Times (13 October) It would seem that it is shudders of delight, not fear, that are being experienced in the City.

Enterprise has become the first oil company to give an Indication of the impact the Middle Eastern troubles and the consequent surge in the price of oil are having. The group told a packed meeting of City fund managers at James Capel, the broker, that the oil price rise had added £1 million a day to its profits.

The winds of war may seem harsh to the Kuwait hostages but in the City it is a delightful zephyr.

Marxism "Fails" Again

The Guardian's much-hyped interview with Russian spy, George Blake, appeared on 19 September along with the headline "Blake says Marxism failed. 

Nowhere in the interview did Blake say any such thing. What he did say was that the "communist" party had failed but someone at the Guardian saw fit to twist this.

In any case Blake is hardly an authority on Marxism: according to the interview he believes in "predestination", meaning that people have no choice of action, and he claims that his belief was "strengthened by Marxism"

Compare this with Marx's own view:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make It under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Where is the "predestination" there?

George Blake certainly had a talent for disclosing state secrets but Marxism obviously remains a secret for him.

No More Workers?

The Times (8 October) reports an amazing court case that is to be heard this month in the High Court.

The subject is to be — is there such a social group as the working class! This astonishing question has arisen over Lady Porter, leader of Westminster Council, trying to pull down a block of flats owned by the Duke of Westminster's Grosvenor Estate.

The flats were granted to the Westminster Council on a 999 year lease in 1937. The lease specified that they be "dwellings for the working class".

Now Lady Porter, heiress to the Tesco millions, wants to pull them down for redevelopment and her claim is "working class no longer has a clear meaning in Thatcher's Britain."

The arrogance of the capitalist class knows no bounds. Here is a rich woman who lives off the surplus value created by the working class and, in an attempt at a shady redevelopment deal, claims there is no such class as the working class!

Hearing Voices

Peter Morgan must be a very clever man. He told a meeting in Birmingham that if the "Jeremiah voices" were heeded then Britain would be talked into recession. (Oracle: 4 October).

If Mr. Morgan is right then he is half-way to discovering the cure for capitalism's boom-slump cycle: after all, if Britain can be talked into recession then it can just as easily be talked back out again!

No wonder Peter Morgan is the highly-paid Director General of the Institute of Directors.

Expert Witness

Mrs. Thatcher's pet economist, Professor Alan Walters, once warned her to "remember how little we understand about the economy".

Can this be true? Look at what happens whenever figures on inflation, High Street spending, balance of trade, etc., are published: they are nearly always very different from what the "experts" predicted.

And although every bank and stockbroker employs well-paid analysts to assess the prospects of industries and companies, they very often get it completely wrong — the City encouraged investors to buy shares in Coloroll and British and Commonwealth just before they both crashed.

Various excuses are given for all this: that companies withhold vital information which makes them look better than they are or that the quality of the analysts is poor.

The truth is that even the best analysts armed with the best available information cannot tell how capitalism's economy will behave. How can they, when producers and consumers all over the world are making decisions about spending, investment, production, etc., which no one knows about, and all doing this within market and political conditions which constantly change.

It would seem for once the Prof, was only telling it like it is.

Follow My Leader

It is a basic tenet of the Socialist Party that the movement for world socialism has got to be democratic: that a majority of the working class must understand and desire socialism before it can come about. This principled position has received nothing but cynicism and abuse from reformist parties such as the Labour Party. That the Labour Party’s aim is nothing other than the continuation of capitalism should be obvious but perhaps there are still some misguided workers who imagine that the Labour Party is at least democratic.

If there are any such dupes around surely this report in The Economist (6 October) must make even them think again:

This year, If he had been able to get away with it, Mr. Kinnock would probably have preferred to have no conference at all. As It was, things were tightly controlled. On a few issues, such as defence cuts and inner-party democracy, the conference did rise in rebellion. But that did not signify much: these days, the leadership simply ignores inconvenient votes.

Thus, after the defence vote that appeared to commit him to a £7 billion cut in Britain's military budget, Mr. Kinnock calmly announced: "We live in the world of realities, not resolutions." And then he walked cheerily away.

Freedom of the Press

The freedom of the Press is one of those capitalist freedoms that appears to be so desirable and worthwhile on paper but when the facts are examined it turns out to be just another capitalist sham.

The Independent on Sunday was launched at the beginning of the year with a fanfare of independent noises. Indeed its statutes forbid any investor from holding more than 15% of its shares. It is in direct competition with the Sunday Correspondent, an ailing rival that Is losing around £250,000 a week and which recently changed to a tabloid format in a desperate attempt to survive.

Strangely enough this change was financed by Mr. Robert Maxwell who owns 8% of the Independent on Sunday. This apparently benign gesture is probably best explained by The Economist (6 October):

Mr. Maxwell hopes that the survival of the Correspondent for just a little longer will increase the pressure on the Independent's shareholders to change the rules and sell more shares to him. Fanciful speculation? Not at all. When we put the theory to Mr. Maxwell, he described It as "a very shrewd and cunning observation".