Superstition in India
Superstition still flourishes in India as elsewhere. Guru Busters (BBC2, 10 September) showed how hordes of self-styled “Gods”, Fakirs, fortune tellers, quacks, etc., hoodwink millions by using simple conjuring tricks, elementary chemistry and seemingly impossible physical feats.
It was amazing to hear wealthy, educated men justifying their allegiance to one God-man, Sai Baba, on the ground that he had given them gold trinkets which he had created “out of nothing”. Strangely, this God’s poorer followers received no gold, only “holy ash”.
Opposing these frauds are the Rationalists who tour the countryside showing audiences how anyone can perform the various “miracles. What they do is worthwhile, but it will be the continuing development of capitalism in India which will most effectively attack the ignorance and backwardness on which superstition feeds.
Meanwhile, our comrades in India get on with the really worthwhile work of spreading the ideas of scientific socialism there.
Must do better, Desmond
So disappointed is Archbishop Desmond Tutu with South Africa’s ANC-led government that he can only award it an alpha minus for its performance so far. (The Herald, 4 September).
The well-publicised scramble by some ANC leaders to climb aboard “the gravy train” was bad enough, but now the government has been caught selling arms to Rwanda through Armcorp, the state arms corporation.
The Archbishop notes that: "Almost everywhere, and certainly in Africa, armies are not for the defence of the citizenry, they are instruments of repression. ”
For this he deserves an alpha plus, but he continues:
“What we want ultimately is to see Africa demilitarised. If you have countries that claim to he democratic, and are friendly with one another, what do you need huge armies for? We should start by dismantling Armcorp. ”
Archbishop Tutu is a humane and well-meaning man, but for being so naive as to imagine that demilitarisation can occur within the conflict-ridden, money-grubbing capitalist system, well, we can only award him a beta minus for that.
Greens in dreamland
Many “Greens” pin their hopes for a greener world on persuading governments to become eco-friendly within the profit- motive economy.
An article in the Observer (17 September) shows what forlorn hopes they are. The British government’s pollution watchdog. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP), reports that a severe shortage of inspectors meant that it carried out only 60 percent of scheduled checks on factories during 1994-5, and as a result pollution spills into the air and rivers doubled.
And the government’s response to this? It is to merge HMIP with the National Rivers Authority next year, a cost-cutting measure which is expected to reduce the number of inspectors still further.
The outlook of these Greens surely amounts to the triumph of hope over experience.
Who are they kidding?
Some Labour MPs have been complaining about Tony Blair’s undemocratic style of leadership, but when was the Labour Party ever democratic?
At the top, Labour’s leaders have a long history’ of simply ignoring conference decisions they didn't like, while trade union bosses cynically cast millions of votes at Labour conferences on behalf of their members, many if not most of whom didn't even support Labour.
At local level there are claims that an influx of new Asian members into Govan Labour Party is connected with the ambition of an Asian councillor to replace the present MP as candidate at the next election. A party official explained on TV that nothing unusual was happening as vote-rigging is the norm prior to candidates being selected.
And West Renfrew MP Tommy Graham has been trying to secure his re-selection by
“recruiting pensioners in pubs and at Linwood DayCare Centre. Many did not even know they were joining the Labour Party" (Observer, 3 September).
Those dissident Labour MPs will be well aware that their party is undemocratic from top to bottom.
Tunnel vision
As commuters and lorry drivers race through the tunnels under the Tyne and the Clyde few of them will think about the crippling condition of osteonecrosis. The victims of this condition, who constructed these tunnels in the sixties, can think of little else.
Osteonecrosis is the direct result of working in compressed air pumped into the tunnels when they were built to stop the walls collapsing. The workers were not warned of the dangers and they were not properly decompressed before returning to the open air.
"Hugh Davey, A Tyne tunneler said: There's about 50 of us from the Tyne. We look like a bunch of old men. I'm 56: I look like a man of 70. I've already had one hip done and I’m on constant pain killers. I had to stop work in 1981. We didn't know what would happen. We thought, we can't come to no harm—they must know what they were doing. We thought they’d look after us. It's destroyed my life ’ ” (Observer, 17 September).
The firms did know “what they were doing”. They were producing a commodity as cheaply as possible. Cutting corners on the health and safety of the working class is just “good business practice”. It is not the function of capitalism to “look after” the welfare of the workers—it’s the profits and the shareholders that have to be looked after.
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That's the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
That's all of the 1995 Socialist Standards now on the blog.
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