News in Review: Berlin again (1962)

The News in Review column from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Berlin again

Berlin seems to be developing into one of capitalism’s nastier perennials.

With each year’s squabbles over the divided city — some of the more minor ones being prime examples of the ridiculous lengths to which capitalist powers go in the risky game of international tit-for-tat–the Russians advance their cause in Germany a little further.

Last year’s wall, a temporary-seeming structure then, is now solider and more permanent. The East German police range their guns along it. This year the Russians have withdrawn their commandant in East Berlin, leaving the Western powers to negotiate with the civilian administration there, or else with nobody.

In retaliation the Western powers have forced the Russians to use a more direct route when taking the guard to their war memorial which stands in West Berlin.

This petty and undignified bickering is only the detail of a more serious situation.

The Soviet object, it seems, is to force the Western powers to acknowledge that Berlin — and indeed Germany — is permanently divided. (Permanently, that is, until another European war draws out the frontiers again, creating new zones of dispute and tension.) If they can do this, the Russians will have won a new foothold in Europe and another buffer state will be between her and any threat of a re-emergent German capitalism.

There was a lot of indignant sob-stuff in the press about Peter Fechter, the 18 year old who was shot down by the East Berlin police and left by them to bleed to death beneath the Wall.

None of the papers recalled that when Fechter was born they were all busily telling us that it was heroic and laudable to kill Germans. At that time the Allied air offensive against Germany was at its height; the persistent bombers killed thousands of Germans quite indiscriminately. It was not their fault that the infant Fechter survived, to die so horribly later.

Berlin is typical of capitalism’s international rivalries. It is fought out over apparently minor details. But its potential is frighteningly dangerous.

And it is all sustained by cynical lies.

Chinese Bomb

Although they were quick to retract it, the statement from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington that China would be able to set off a nuclear explosion in a few months was enough to send a shiver down our spines.

More bombs. More tests. More fallout. More suffering. More death.

That is the immediate prospect. For the longer run, China’s bomb will mean a fiercer arms race and an increase in the tension in any dispute between her and the other great powers. And perhaps in the end a bigger and more destructive war.

China, like any aspirant capitalist power, has long been determined to make nuclear weapons. And, just like the others, she will excuse them with any sort of lying propaganda.

Last year, the general manager of Reuters persuaded the Chinese Foreign Secretary to talk on this subject. Marshall Chen Yi said that China’s having the bomb would actually decrease the chance of a war, because when only a few powers had it they were more tempted to throw their weight about.

We may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, for it is the very reverse of the deterrent theory which the nuclear powers now use to justify their having the bomb. These countries have always claimed that what stops a war is the fact that they have an almost exclusive possession of the biggest of all sticks.

Who should we believe in this? London, Washington and Moscow? Or Peking? In fact, nobody need worry about the answer to that question.

For what will China do when she has got the bomb? Will she follow the logic of Chen Yi’s argument and give the secret to the world? To India, for example? To Japan? If all the other nuclear powers are anything to go by China will forget her big-talk and keep her secrets to herself.

And perhaps we may permit ourselves a grim smile at this, too.

Capitalism will always have its ghastly weapons and it will always have its paid liars to excuse them. While they are spinning their lies the weapons get bigger and more horrifying and the conflicts grow more agonising.

Still feel like smiling?

Farnborough

Apart from the little-boy excitements of the machines themselves, what was the interesting and significant thing about this year’s Air Show at Farnborough?

Not so long ago it was a popular working-class idea that the aircraft industry was bound to expand into the future and that nobody who made his career in it could fail. This was the reason for many workers—among them graduates from universities—taking jobs with the aeroplane manufacturers.

But like many working-class assumptions, this one took no account of the nature of the beast called capitalism.

There were no turbo-prop aircraft on show this year. Yet the British aircraft industry once calculated that these would be more economical to run than the big jets and would therefore sell better to the airlines which, for all their superficial glamour, must have a sordid capitalist interest in cheap operating costs. Boeing, Douglas and Sud-Aviation in France proved this calculation wrong. So the turbo-prop is a dead-end and all the money tied up in it has gone down the drain. BOAC has its last Britannias up for sale for next to nothing.

Now the British industry is gambling on the future success of the VC10 and the de Havilland Trident. For neither of these are the prospects golden. If the fears which are expressed for them come to reality there will probably be another big cut-back in the aircraft industry and a lot more of its workers unemployed.

The airlines, too, are facing their problems. To stay in the race, each of them is forced to buy the latest, biggest, fastest (which usually also means the noisiest) machines on offer. The result up to now is that the number of seats available far exceeds the passengers who want them. So there is fierce competition, especially on the Trans-Atlantic runs.

This has caused most airlines in the world to fail to make a profit. Last month BEA one of the few profitable lines up to the present—announced that interest payments had turned a working profit of £550,000 into a loss of a million and a half pounds.

We all know what capitalism says must happen to an industry which does not make a profit. Aircraft are something of a special case; there are elements of national prestige and strategy to take into account. But in the end, in one way or another, the rule will apply.

For a lot of aircraft workers it looks like being a very bumpy ride.

Fasten your safety belts, please.

Nkrumah strikes

Doctor Nkrumah has succeeded in battling many people with his latest round of deportations and imprisonments.

It is simple enough to discern the reason for his expelling the Bishops Roseveare and Patterson. Both of them were involved in criticising the Young Pioneers, a nationalistic youth organisation whose members are required to chant, among other nonsense, that “Nkrumah never dies.”

Nobody who knows anything about Ghana under Nkrumah expected the Bishops to get away with suggesting that in the country’s youngsters should spend less time in worshipping the god in Accra and more in the (equally futile) worship of the god who they say is in a place called heaven.

But it is harder to explain the detention of Mr. Adamafio, Mr. Cofie Crabbe and Mr. Ako Adjei. The first two of these men were up to the hilt in Nkrumah’s campaign against the churches. We might have thought them safe in their jobs.

Perhaps they were involved in the bomb-throwing which has been going on in Ghana of late. Or perhaps they were just becoming too great rivals to Nkrumah’s supremacy.

Now they have gone and Krobo Edusei, famous for his wife’s £3,000 bed, is back in the government after his dismissal six months ago. Nkrumah, already overloaded with jobs (among others, he controls the Convention People’s Party, the Ghana Civil Service and the Volta Dam project) has taken on the Foreign Secretaryship.

These moves may be difficult to explain to our entire satisfaction, but one or two things can be said for sure.

Nkrumah is a dictator. His Young Pioneers are a copy, albeit a weak one, of the Hitler Youth movement. In taking on totalitarian powers, Nkrumah has betrayed the promises he made when he was fighting the British for Ghana’s independence.

There is nothing new in this. Postwar history is full of examples of nationalist dictators who ousted their country’s occupiers and came to power themselves with slogans of eternal liberty.

Many people outside Ghana were taken in by Nkrumah’s propaganda in the old days. Shocked though they may now be, they still lend their ears to the nationalists who are currently banging the independence drum.

Let Nkrumah’s Ghana stand as a warning that national independence has nothing to offer the ordinary people who are misled into supporting it and who end up by being oppressed and exploited by it.

Dr. Soblen

The death of Doctor Soblen brought to a close another of capitalism’s nasty little episodes.

Soblen killed himelf because, above everything else, he did not want to go back to the United States to serve his sentence for spying for Russia. The British government, perhaps at the insistence of Washington, were determined that he should be sent back. To get their way, they were prepared to break some of the legalities which at other times they hypocritically defend.

Great Britain has signed a treaty of extradition with, among others, the United States. This treaty means that if, say, a murderer escapes to America the government there will catch him and end him to this country for trial.

This treaty expressly excludes spies. The reasons are obvious, all countries have their network of espionage and it would be embarrassing for all of them if, should one of their agents flee, he could be extradited by the country he had been spying on.

Soblen should have been covered by this provision; in a sense, he was. The government never fought his case on the grounds that he was to be extradited. They only insisted that he should be deported.

But deportation only means that a person is sent out of a country—it does not mean that he must be sent to any particular other country. He can choose, in fact, the frontier by which he leaves, if Soblen had been deported he might have chosen to go to one of the Iron Curtain countries where, no doubt, he would have been welcomed as a hero.

The government were, of course, aware of this. In the name of the Anglo-American alliance they ignored the laws which they themselves have made to make their system run more smoothly.

Soblen was a tragic dupe to the illusion that Russian capitalism is worth working and dying for. This does not obscure the fact that he was a victim of the callous cynicism which all capitalist powers—including Russia fall back on when it suits them.

South Africa

At the time of the Sharpeville shootings and the “Boycott South African” campaign many anti-apartheid spokesmen went to great lengths to show how South Africa’s economy would suffer as a result of world opinion and moral indignation.

Up to the present the owners of the means of life in South Africa are no more or less affected by trials and tribulations than their brothers in less race-prejudiced countries. In fact, some foreign industrialists think the place has some attraction?.

Textile chief Mr. Cyril Lord intends to move the contents of two cotton mills from Lancashire to the Bantu areas of the Union. He says the British Government has failed to protect textile interests against cheap Asian competition. Some 100 key men are offered jobs abroad; the rest face the sack.

A South African official in London said: “Mr. Lord will have the advantages of cheap labour among others.” (Daily Herald, September 12th, 1962.)

Will Mr. Lord continue to demand that the British Government protect their textile interests by keeping out his cheap South African cotton goods? Boycotters and “Ban this and that” mongers may note that, while workers may be threatened with ills such as unemployment, propertied groups do not suffer economically, even though they sanction or commit acts which are quite anti-social.

The Passing Show: Peace and Quiet (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the October 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peace and Quietude

“London Stinks,” rapped out the young girl to her friend, sitting near me in the bus, one evening. Figuratively or literally, I couldn’t help thinking of the undoubted truth of her words.

Working for my wage packet in the outskirts not far from London Airport, the high summer season has brought the noise of passing aircraft — over 60 of them every hour—to a hideous and almost unbearable pitch. At times the scream of one jet has not had time to die away before its place is taken by another coming in to land or taking off. And so it goes on throughout the working day and far into the night. Of course, you can cut down the noise a little by closing the windows—too bad then if it’s a hot and stuffy day.

Just down the road the rush-hour traffic problem has reached immense proportions, and the noise, fumes and stink are a veritable assault on the senses. Even out of the rush hour conditions are not easy, and you very often take your life in your hands just to venture across the road. Pity, too, those who have the misfortune to live by the new M.4 flyover which has sliced its way across the Great West Road and jumps over factories and houses alike. For these unfortunates it has happened with bewildering speed, this steel and concrete monster, the backcloth to their drab houses huddled together on a pre-war council estate.

Doctors agree that the modern noise problem has bad effects on health, and the Government, with tongue in cheek, tut-tuts in agreement. There was even the passing of a Noise Abatement Act—a private Member’s Bill—about five years ago, much to the joy of The Noise Abatement Society. But its provisions were concerned with acts of nuisance between individuals, and the really big culprits of road and air noise were left unscathed. In fact, the Society’s secretary confessed his sadness at the remarks of the (then) Aviation Minister, Peter Thorneycroft that:—

“he agreed with Lord Douglas that money is more important than the sufferings of people, and would add that so also was the progress of aviation.” (Q.P.—Society’s Journal, January, 1961).

Not the sort of answer to surprise Socialists, although the secretary seems to have been caught off balance by it. However, this did not stop the editorial page from claiming:—

“the undemocratic Civil Aviation Act of 1947 forbids action against owners of noisy aircraft, but public clamour is such that its repeal cannot long be delayed.”

That was more than four years ago and the clamour seems to have been drowned in the much greater and ever increasing din. Is it not surprising then to see a letter to The Guardian of August 19th by the Society’s chairman in similar vein and with even bolder (and wilder) prophecy thus:—

“We aim to get this undemocratic Act repealed, but meanwhile the volume of protest is growing to such proportions that both politicians and civil servants are looking to their defences, and we would not be at all surprised to learn that . . . work is to commence on the new London Airport designed by the Society’s architect friends to cause no noise nuisance.”

Hope, it seems, springs eternal in the reformer’s breast, despite the unpleasant facts of capitalist life. So let me spell out one or two simple home truths for the benefit of this and other organisations. First of all, the noise nuisance bears most heavily on the working class—we have no alternative to putting up with the racket, not being able to pop off to a secluded country mansion when we feel like it. And if recent signs are anything to go by, there’s a whole lot more to come.

The truth is contained in Thorneycroft’s brazenly outspoken words. That is why any Government will only try to tackle the problem if there is the prospect of a cheap solution or if the trouble has reached such proportions that it is adversely affecting the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, or a sufficiently important section of them. Until then, they couldn’t care less.

By Way of Post Script

The Guardian of August 17th reports that work on the construction of a new deep water berth at Aberdeen Harbour was stopped so that the Queen could sleep undisturbed. Said one workman: “There was a whine from a derrick and it might have been noisy if they were not used to it.” No comment .

Wages?

I was tickled pink by this title to an advert in the national press a short while ago. Maybe you saw it, too. There’s this photograph of a comely young man, obviously a newcomer to the firm, looking expectantly at an older man (obviously not a newcomer), and when we get our look in, the question has already been popped.

“Wages?” repeats the older man, rolling the word round his mouth while he thinks of an answer to head the other off. Then at last, “We pay ours by credit transfer.” And that is that. There follows a blurb about the advantages of wages and salaries being paid through the bank, including the very attractive one of huge savings in clerical time, which in turn means cost reductions for the employer.

A clever enough advert really, starting off with the word to make any worker look twice, then switching quickly to the punch line (pity they didn’t show a close-up then of the young man’s face) with particular appeal to your boss but not forgetting to remind you that “it means less likelihood of loss.” You can, of course, lose the money after you’ve drawn it from the bank, but we’ll not quibble over such a small detail as that.

Now I have an interest in the wages question for the simple reason that I am cursed with the fate of having to work for them to get a living. I’m also aware that more employers are turning to paying wages by cheque or by direct credit transfer for the reasons already mentioned and to avoid the risk of pay snatches, which our advert modestly calls “the hazard of moving large sums of cash.” My firm introduced the system over six years ago amidst a flurry of mixed consternation and excitement among the office workers.

But it’s all settled down now. We get paid monthly instead of weekly, and perhaps the only change is that some of us are broke for four days at the end of the month instead of for one day at the end of each week. Maybe some found it a bit precarious at first when they had no spare money to tide them over to the first monthly pay day, but these troubles have long been forgotten, and the pay slip is awaited as eagerly as the old pay packet used to be.

There were some who hinted darkly that the whole thing was a swindle, but of course there was no evidence for this. When the dust of argument finally settled, even the dimmest could see that we were no better or worse off than before. There was a swindle there somewhere, of course, but as usual they didn’t spot it. It lies not in the particular arrangement of wage payment but in the very wages system itself. And the swindle is perpetrated every second of our working day. For no matter what the size of our wage packet (oops, sorry, Pay Slip) it represents a value smaller than the goods we produce and the services we render. There lies the secret of our employer’s riches and of our poverty.

So don’t waste time quibbling over the details of the swindle’s administration, but work to end it by establishing a moneyless, wageless world of common ownership. But don’t bother your boss with this argument especially in working time—he’s not likely to appreciate the point.

Gaspers

“Equality in health is a practical impossibility. The Duke or Member of Parliament will always insist on better attention than the dustman.” (Conservative Party Monday Club Research Group. 2.9.65.)

“Coal is money, and if men don’t turn up and don’t produce it, then there is no money.” (NCB Chairman Lord Robens. 2.9.65.)

“If the voluntary system fails, we might have to provide for statutory reference of every claim above the norm to go to an expanded and strengthened Prices and Incomes Board . . .” (The Prime Minister, (2.8.65.)

“Companies exist to produce goods and make profits . . .” (Daily Express Editorial, 23.8.65.)

Eddie Critchfield

News in Review: Mr & Mrs Average (1961)

The News in Review column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr & Mrs Average

According to a new Stationery Office publication—Britain, 1961 Edition— “ Mr. and Mrs. Average " are described as having a TV set, vacuum cleaner and occasionally a washing machine and a 'fridge. The acquisition of these goods is equated by advertisements, films and magazines to true, lasting happiness. We all know the phrases “No more washday fatigue with Blank's wonderful washing machine", etc. The mere fact of possessing these goods, however, does not produce happiness as soon as the gadget is installed. On the contrary, they often produce problems, mainly financial, and occasionally their "happy" possessors are driven to desperation, as in the case of a young couple in Birmingham, who clearly were "Mr. and Mrs. Average". The husband was the envy of the neighbourhood. He had bought a five-piece living room suite, washing machine, bedroom suite and TV set on hire purchase, and had redecorated his 15/- a week house from top to bottom. On 28th December I960, with the Christmas decorations still hanging gaily, the husband, wife and their 2 year old daughter were found dead in their gleaming, gas-filled kitchen. The wife was expecting her second child the following week. A note said that they worried about their hire purchase debts.

Never had it so good . . .

Airways Strike

The maintenance staff of BOAC and BEA staged a four-hour stoppage on Wednesday, January 2nd, in support of a wage claim that has been going through the laborious negotiating machinery. This, of course, caused some dislocation of airline schedules. This undoubtedly caused a lot of hardship to some passengers, but the unfortunate fact is that for the aircraft workers one of the few ways in which the employers and their own union officials can be gingered up is by resort to a strike. This was bound to be unpopular: remember how the press and the Government castigated the railwaymen and the busmen in the past for their strike action that "inconvenienced the public"?

But what happened when the strikers at the airport reported for duty after the four-hour stoppage? BEA immediately suspended them for a further 24 hours, causing six times as much inconvenience to the public. 

One would have thought that this would have brought howls of protest from the press and Government. But the only newspaper comment was typified by the Daily Mail of January 6th, which said that BEA was determined to push home the lesson to the strikers. It seems that what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.

On the Brink

Both Russia and the United States waxed indignant about each other's interference in the Laos disturbances. Sheer hypocrisy of course, because they had both been dabbling their fingers in that particular pie.

The Russians have supplied arms to Captain Kong Lae's army. Since 1954, the United States has pumped between forty and fifty million dollars into Laos. Washington wants value for its money: in 1958, it played its part in the dismissal of Prince Souvanha Phouma's government, after the elections in May of that year had returned a lot of communist members.

China is probably interested in the strategic potential of Laos, as a buffer between her and SEATO member Thailand. The Americans, notoriously trigger-neurotic in the Far East, seem to want the country more firmly under their control, and not simply neutralist.

The Laos dispute may be small in itself, but it is a miniature of the clashing interests of two giant power blocs. It could be another Korea. Or even a Sarajevo or a Danzig.

This must be the fear which overhangs every minor upheaval in the world. We are as far away from peace as ever.

Yes to De Gaulle

General de Gaulle came to power to joyful motor horns tooting the rhythm of Algerie francaise in the streets of Paris. This was an exuberant indication of the hopes of the general's supporters, that he would ruthlessly crush the FLN and maintain French rule over Algeria.

In the event de Gaulle, by resolving to come to terms with Algerian nationalism, has shown the more realistic assessment of the interests of French capitalism. In this, like many other politicians, he has disappointed a lot of his former supporters.

Last month's affirmative vote for the general's proposals gave the go-ahead to the organisation of another referendum, to be held in Algeria alone. This could express a preference for an independent country.

The second referendum will be held if security conditions in Algeria allow. This could mean that there will soon be further talks between the French government and the FLN, and that the end of the present fighting in Algeria may be in sight.

Evidently de Gaulle was determined to get his way. The questions in the referendum were loaded, the government hogged most of the propaganda and left the French army in no doubt as to how it should vote.

If this is the beginning of the road to peace in Algeria, there is no cause for another joyful tooting of horns. We all know that there will be other Algerias, with their own bloodshed and misery.

Canadian Illusion

It was not so very long ago that some of the air and sea lines in this country were working hectic overtime to accommodate all the people who were clamouring to emigrate to Canada.

These people must have gone with great expectations of a country full of good things, where everybody was happy. How has it turned out?

It is now expected that this month, Canada’s unemployment will reach ten per cent, of its working population, which is the highest since the war, and several times higher than in Great Britain.

The solutions which have been recommended for Canada's slump are not new. Some economists favour higher import tariffs and a strong effort to replace imported goods with home products. Others advocate a freer economy, with fewer fiscal restrictions.

Perhaps these are the same economists who were telling us, only yesterday, that the days of boom and slump belonged to an old era of ignorance and were gone for ever.

The emigrants must know differently. But there is little hope that they will lose the illusions which they took west with them.

Some may return to this country, or travel on to other lands. Others will stay in Canada. But wherever they go capitalism, and its problems, will be waiting to greet them.

Battle of the Roads

Despite the reduction in road deaths over the recent Christmas period as compared with that of 1959, the Ministry of Transport and the various road safety organisations are still faced with the task of exhorting the restless tide of humanity, to walk and drive carefully. Each year hundreds of proposals for road safety are considered. One of the main difficulties is that of the separation of pedestrians and traffic, but since this can only be accomplished at enormous cost, it is not considered practical, and consequently palliatives and not remedies are preferred.

There is a mistaken belief among some people that these road problems are only a recent phenomenon, but as long ago as 1846 the daily newspapers were complaining of the inadequacies of the principal thoroughfares and of the fact that all that could be done was to patch up and mend. In today’s battle of the roads one can see all the contradictory nature of capitalist society. Whilst Mr. Marples is making his appeal, we are being told about the super-petrols which are supposed to make cars go faster, not to mention the prestige value of the bigger and faster car.

But big problems are often solved by simple remedies. The question of cost in relation to profit is at the root not only of the road problem, but of most of the major problems facing society today. The road problem is aggravated by the thousands of commercial and business vehicles which congest the highways and bye-ways, taking back and forth goods which have covered the same ground several times before. There are also thousands of small, medium, and large size shops selling identical goods to the people in the already overcrowded towns and cities. We can only wonder that the accident rate is not higher than the statistics show.

Appeals for less density of commerce and industry in the larger cities have failed. London, for instance, seems to be going the same way as New York and this fact alone should dispel any illusions the long suffering travelling public have of ever avoiding the “ peak hour ” chaos—a battle of the roads with no holds barred.

Finance and Industry: For the record (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the record

Britain's industrial revolution was powered by coal and forged in iron. It was the Darby's of Coalbrookdale, a family of ironmasters, who pioneered the technique of first coking the coal which in turn enabled the use of English ores; in less than half a century, coal and iron between them had transformed the face of England. Since then coal has lost ground to oil, but iron and steel continue to dominate the economy of world capitalism.

It was iron that provided a material strong enough to stand up to steam and so paved the way for Watt’s engines. Industry was able to get away from the rivers and streams and its dependence on waterwheels. Hundreds of miles of canals were built in no time to cope with the increased demands of the blast furnaces for coal. Roads were built to carry away the manufactures.

In the I850's, iron gave way to steel with the developments introduced by Bessemer and Siemens of using “blowers” to raise the furnace temperature and get rid of the impurities in the iron. Since then there have been further improvements, using electric furnaces for special steels and, very recently, the use of oxygen instead of air for the blast. At the same time, as the industry has grown bigger and bigger, more use has been made of the integrated plant principle whereby all the processes of steelmaking are concentrated on the same site- hence the growth of the huge complexes which are the dominant feature today.

These installations need vast capital resources. United States Steel, the biggest producer in the world, has a share capital of over £1,000 million and its nearest rival. Bethlehem Steel, more than £500 million. The world is now scoured for iron-ore; mountains of it are literally taken away and transported thousands of miles to the furnaces. Marvels of engineering construction are built to load and unload it and bulk carriers of up to 100,000 tons ply a ferry service across the oceans. More and more, the furnaces are migrating to the coast to eliminate transport costs—the result is the huge new plants at Newport and Dunkirk, and the proposed giant complex at Rotterdam.

In the Darby’s time, a firm was big if it produced a thousand tons of iron a year; nowadays it is in economic danger if it produces less than a million, or even two million, tons. Steel is still one of the pillars of capitalism’s economy—it is still the barometer that can forecast whether the economy is set fair, or there are storms ahead, or just a period of doldrums.

As usual under capitalism, the tendency is towards bigger and bigger units. There are still absorptions and amalgamations going on, and more and more does an annual output of 2 million tons seem the minimum unit for present day efficiency and competitiveness. In the following table, showing the “top twenty” producers in the world excluding Russia and China, the minimum is actually about 2$ million tons a year.

The most striking impression from the figures is, of course, the overwhelming preponderance of the American firms, particularly U.S. steel, which on its own has a greater output of steel than the whole of the U.K. It is also interesting to note the apparently greater fragmentation of the British industry. United Steel is the only British firm to appear, in the table and there is only one other, the Steel Company of Wales, in the next ten, whereas there are three further German companies, three French, and one Japanese.

We hope to take a further look into the international steel industry in a later issue.

Rivalry v. Safety

We do not need to labour the point about the intense competition existing at present in the aviation industry. What with the excitement over Australia’s decision to buy American TFX's instead of British TSR-2's, the race between the Anglo/French Concord and the U.S. Mach 2 airliner; and the current struggle of B.A.C. to get their V.C.-10 into the air commercially before the Douglas D.C.-9; the aeroplane manufacturers must really be having a worrying time of it.

It was thus a major setback for B.A.C. when their prototype V.C.-I0 crashed recently, apparently as a result of trouble with the tail assembly.

As is well known, the V.C.-10 carries on a technique, engines set well back in the rear, that was developed originally by the French company, Sud-Aviation, with their Caravelle. And it is with Sud- Aviation that B.A.C. are developing the new supersonic Concord.

It has also been known for some time that the V.C.-10 has been running into snags with this particular tail assembly—only a few months ago B.A.C. announced publicly that they had had to modify it. Strong rumour also has it that the Caravelle went through similar troubles in its early development stages. What more natural, then, that B.A.C. should ask Sud-Aviation—after all, their collaborators in the Concord—for details of their earlier experiences of putting engines under the tail?

And what sort of an answer do you think they got? A very dusty one, according to an Insight report in the Sunday Times of October 27 -“Sud-Aviation would disclose nothing.”

A few months later, the V.C.-10 crashed, killing all its crew. There may conceivably be other crashes before the makers discover what is happening to the tail assembly.

In the meantime, the Caravelle flies on, with hardly a competitor. And the longer the V.C.-10 takes to get commercially off the ground the longer will Sud-Aviation enjoy this happy state of affairs. Co-operation may be all very well but under capitalism one must be very careful not to carry it too far.

Stan Hampson

BEA’s hidden profits (1963)

From the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In case any of our readers should misunderstand the intention behind the phrase “ . . . B.E.A. pointed out how generous a deal its shareholders have got . . in October’s News In Review, we publish the following clarification.

There are no shareholders or stockholders in B.E.A. or B.O.A.C. so there are no individual investors who have an interest in whether the corporations make a profit or loss.

Under the Air Corporations Act 1949 Sections 9 and 10 the corporations were authorized to issue stock (subject to permission having been given by the Treasury) and the stock carried Treasury guarantee for interest and capital. Both corporations had issues of stock. For example, B.O A. 3% stock 1960/70, B.O.A. 2½% stock 1977/82. However, under a later act, the Finance Act, 1956, the corporations were permitted to raise money by means of loans from the Exchequer with the result that these Exchequer advances have replaced the old arrangements of stock issues.

But, even under the old arrangements there were no investors who had any interest in whether the corporations made a loss or a profit. Though the stock bore the name of B.O.A. or B.E.A., they were fixed interest stocks and the interest and capital were guaranteed by the Treasury. In this respect the air corporations were following the arrangements which are fairly general throughout the nationalised industries.

Editorial Committee.

Reported in Hansard (1949)

From the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Slums, like Poverty, are still with us.

Mr. Gibson (Labour, Kennington): ". . . There is no excuse whatever for the slightest complacency, for much remains to be done; in addition, there are slums which need to be pulled down; some of us have already made a start on slum clearance. I always thought that I knew something about slum conditions, but last week, when I went into one of the worst slum areas in London, I was appalled at the conditions existing in one part of Islington. The houses themselves are so sound structurally that medical officers of health are dubious about condemning them, but inside they have been allowed to become festering dens of unhealthy life, with walls falling down, floors cracking, no proper convenience, and no water. There are thousands of houses like these, not only in London but in many other large cities, which must be dealt with. There is, therefore, no call for anyone to imagine that there is not still a great deal to be done in the building of new houses.”

(Housing Debate, 4/7/49.)

* * *

Day to Day Struggle—Matches Front.

Mr. W. Gallagher (Communist, East Fife): “ . . . In this particular matter of matches, as a pipe smoker and as one who uses a very considerable amount of matches, I ask the Economic Secretary to discuss the matter again with the Chancellor and see whether they cannot find some other way of assisting the manufacturers to meet the costs of production rather than by way of making an increase of this kind. I ask him very sincerely to withdraw this proposal.”

(Finance Bill, Proposal to raise price of matches by halfpenny a box. 22/6/49.)

* * *

Members of Nationalised Boards.

Parliamentary Secretary to Ministry of Civil Aviation (Mr. Lindgren): “… All those who have any responsibility for airline operation are in favour of this Bill; not only that, they ask for it to be given legislative effect at the earliest possible moment. The boards of B.O.A.C. and B.S.A.A. are in favour of the Bill, and those boards are composed of business men—men who prior to coming into association with civil air transport were and in some cases still are associated with successful private enterprise …”

(Airways Corporation Bill, Second Reading, 29/6/49.)

* * *

A Man in an Absolute Muddle

Mr. J. Scollan (Labour, West Renfrew): ". . . The Chancellor of the Exchequer has told us about the dollar crisis. What was the panacea that he had to offer for the problem facing us? Was it not the same as was offered in the 1930’s during the depression: reduce costs and increase production? Did not wages go down in the 1930’s? Had not we a lock-out in 1926 for the miners? Were not the miners locked out for weeks on end, until prices were brought down? Did that bring prosperity? It brought misery, poverty and degradation. I am surprised to hear some of the arguments today. What are the Government going to do to see that we can meet France and other countries in fair competition? It does not seem to occur to anyone that we recently decided upon a European bloc and unity. Now we are deciding to go into competition with the very people with whom we were to be united. We are hoping that instead of unemployment being in Scotland, it will be in France. That is the cure. I say to the Secretary of State for Scotland that if Scotland were a free and independent country—I am not pleading Nationalism— it could stand on its own economy in the world blizzard that is likely to hit us.”

(Debate on Scotland [Industry], 7/7/49.)

* * *

A Bouquet for American Capitalism—from a Labourite

Mr. J. Carmichael (Labour, Glasgow, Bridgeton): “. . . My only trouble is the attempt on the part of some people to complain about the interference of American capitalism. Does anybody doubt the fact that whatever Government would have been in, there would have been need of American aid? Our complaint all along has been that America might have been more liberal in her aid, recognising the great economic sacrifices made by this country during the war. They were compelled to intervene. I do not complain about American financial intervention. I welcome it, because today in Scotland we have less unemployment than we had in the bad old days.”

(Debate on Scotland [Industry], 7/7/49.)

* * *

Plain Words from a Tory

Major G. Lloyd (Conservative, East Renfrew): “. . . The solution is to be found in a steady courageous determination to bring down costs of production, to make it easier in a buyers’ market for our industrialists, traders and men of commerce to sell the goods, as a result of which alone they can employ the people . . . People can only be employed if our industrialists can sell goods. If they cannot do that, they cannot employ the people. There is no politics in it. It is a matter of plain economic common-sense.”

(Debate on Scotland [Industry], 7/7/49.)

* * *

A Labour Leader talks Capitalist Economics

Mr. A. Woodburn (Secretary .of State for Scotland): “. . . However, one thing is certain, that the buyers’ market which has obtained since the war is ending. Just as we may have to go without some imports, so other countries may have to do without what we would like to send them. We may have to make both effort and sacrifice to stimulate trade by quality, price and delivery. If then, we are to keep vital trade going, our efforts must be directed to producing goods which the world wants at the prices at which other people are able or ready to pay. We cannot live without imports. This country must trade, or die.”

(Debate on Scotland [Industry], 7/7/49.)

Stan Hampson

On the pin (1964)

From the July 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oklahoma City, USA, has the unpleasant distinction of being the site of an experiment in discomfort. Some Oklahomans are protesting at this and there can be little wonder that they are. But experiments on human beings in the mass are not a novelty; they are, in fact, going on all the time.

Each morning for the past five months, jet aircraft have flown backwards and forwards over Oklahoma City, deliberately breaking through the sound barrier about half a dozen times between seven o’clock and about half past one. This will go on, day after day, until the beginning of next month.

The object of these experiments is to find out the effect which sonic booms have upon the people on the ground. Now that the American aircraft industry has entered the international race to build a supersonic airliner, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is trying to discover what would constitute an aircraft “acceptable” to the people it will fly over. There is no doubt that the projected airliner will be an excessive nuisance; the FAA are experimenting to find out the limits to which the nuisance can go. How much noise and other discomfort will people stand ?

There has inevitably been some protest from Oklahoma City, a small part of whose 500,000 people not see why their homes should be damaged (windows have broken, walls have sagged and bulged, plaster has split under the boom), their nerves shattered and their lives endangered (one ceiling which came down in the Negro section of the City narrowly missed a six year old child), in the cause of building a bigger, faster, noisier, more objectionable aircraft than those which already cause considerable disturbance.

The FAA has offered a conciliatory front to the protestors—they even promised to call off the experiments if the City authorities asked them to. But not all of Oklahoma’s citizens dislike the booms (we shall come to the reason for this in a moment), so no such request has been made. In any event, there is little doubt that, whatever Oklahoma or any other community may say, the world is going to be pestered by the supersonic airliners.

The protests of the people who live around London Airport have not been able to reduce the noise nuisance there; in fact, jet flights, which are the main culprits, steadily increase. Occasionally the government pulls off a dishonest trick. As the pace of competition among the jet operators gets hotter, the airlines make frequent application to be allowed to step up their allocation of flights—sometimes night flights. It is not unknown for the Ministry of Aviation to grant only part of such application, and to follow this with such a hullabaloo about their professed concern for the eardrums of the people around the airport that the fact that they have actually granted an increase in flights goes almost unnoticed.

The reason for the popularity of the big jets is that they are one of the cheapest methods of moving people over long distances by air that has ever been discovered. This means that their operator can hope to make big profits from them. If this should apply also to the supersonic liner, then that monster will before long be crashing about over our heads.

The thing which will stop the supersonic project will not be the demonstrations of the people who will be driven to distraction by it. It will not be because the thing is officially considered to be too great an assault upon human living conditions. The airliner will be abandoned if it is proved to be so crushingly unprofitable that the nations who are now racing to build it are persuaded that their economic interests are better served by dropping the project.

This has happened before. The post war years are littered with aircraft—the Brabazon, the Princess flying boat—which did not make the commercial grade. Others—the Vanguard, for example—only scraped in and were immediately an economic embarrassment. The development of the helicopter as an inter city link has been held in check not because it is a deafeningly clacking contraption (which it is) but because its operators have not been able to make it pay.

We may reflect, with a wry smile, upon the fact that up to now the most profitable aircraft have also been among the most objectionable. So we have got the jets, whose throaty scream drowns all conversation as they pass overhead at a height at which the traditional piston engine would hardly be noticed. And we have not got the flying boats, which might have been that much less of a nuisance because their airports would have probably been built on the coast. If this unfortunate circumstance is anything like a constant rule, the supersonic jets will be profitable. And we shall look back wistfully to the comparatively peaceful days when simple 707’s thundered over the roof-tops.

The Oklahoma experiments will then be consigned to embarrassed history. But other experiments, in different fields, will go on. Day after day, for example, we are subjected to investigation by what are officially known as market research organisations. Smooth, earnestly bespectacled young men call at our front doors, flick over plastic pictures of electric shavers, challenging us to identify their makers. (The writer, who has a weakness for electric shavers and who therefore devours all the ads for them, came out with full marks for this, but was disappointed not to receive a prize.)

The same young men may come back again some time later, with other questions about other products. They do not call at every house. They “sample” us, which perhaps makes some people feel like rare sherry, except that rare sherry is more respected by its drinkers than we are by our masters.

The smart young men have even divided us into groups, according to the jobs we do and how much we get for it. A company director is probably in group A or B. A tool maker may be somewhere in Group C. And so on down the alphabet, until somewhere among the E’s are the people, who scrape along on National Assistance.

None of the smart young men seem to see anything wrong in this. Most of them are anxious to identify themselves with the market research herd, dressing, talking and even combing their hair to the same pattern. They could have stepped straight out of those exceedingly irritating advertisements which, by a novel stroke, tell us when not to chew gum. They look out at the world with confident eyes, convinced of their ability to sell it absolutely anything.

The reason for this sort of activity—to use a rather delicate word for it—is that capitalist industry must always be obsessed by its markets. Profit is at the moment the primary objective of production- but although it is made when the goods are produced, profit can only be realised when they are sold. It did not take capitalism long to realise that it had better try to get to know its markets. So they are constantly sampling us, experimenting on us, sending out their smart young men to put us under their microscopes.

They may even try to alter a market, to persuade us to stop buying one type of product and to start buying another. Or they may try to open up new markets, with goods which have not been widely sold before. (Any day now, for example, we shall be swamped with advertisements for central heating systems.)

In Oklahoma, as a matter of fact, some of the business interests descry a market in the sonic booms, The local Chamber of Commerce hope that, if the experiments help to turn out an “acceptable” aircraft, Oklahoma’s airfield will be developed as one of the world's first supersonic airports. Speculating on this prospect, they have already bought up a lot of land around the airfield. Hungrily they look to the business which a supersonic airport would bring them—the contracts to build and to supply, and the extra population which would come to the area. Dazzled by visions of the golden economic boom, the business men of Oklahoma City have no eyes for the distress which the sonic booms will cause to the people of the area.

Experiments are not confined to the commercial field. Everyone knows that the great publicity drive which the Conservative Party launched before their victory in 1959 was managed by one of this country’s leading advertising agencies. This agency did not rush out haphazardly, slapping up hastily designed posters in any old place. They first of all took their sample of what they call public opinion, they made their experiments and they thought around it all. Only then did they decide on the line which their publicity should take.

The lessons of that defeat were not wasted upon the Labour Party. They assembled their own force of high powered admen, who gravely discussed which line they should adopt. Should they plug Nationalisation? Pensions? Roads? Out of all this came the Let's Go slogan, and the thumbs up sign— and is it only coincidence that Mr. Wilson is now inseparable from his pipe?

All of this effort has gone into finding out what the people will bear in the way of election propaganda, in the same way as the Oklahoma experiments are supposed to find out what they will bear in the way of thunder over their heads. It has gone into finding out what political image will appeal most to the voters’ ignorance and apathy. That is why the Tories no longer present themselves as the party born with a divine right to rule and why Labour has stuffed away its cloth cap, which is now worn only at events like Miners' Galas.

Nobody is exempt from such investigations—even the investigators themselves. That paunchy, florid sales executive, poring over the latest market research returns, enunciating in careful accents through his teeth, does not escape. He, too, is part of a market, to be assessed and experimented upon. Even the chewing gum makers are after him, along with the car firms and the people who try to persuade him that theirs is the best way of suppressing his ulcers.

Capitalism exploits and restricts its entire working class. But more than that, it degrades us in a multitude of ways. It has us wriggling on a pin on its observation board, and is carefully noting our every twitch and spasm. Does that spasm indicate that we would prefer another sort of pin? Does that twitch mean that we want one with a different shape head? If there’s money in it, capitalism is interested.

Maybe the working class do not object to this. In moments of despair, it even seems that they actually like it. In which case they do not object to, they like, blatant humiliation.

But, as Vera Lynn never tired of pointing out, somewhere there is a silver lining. Whatever the result of the experiments, and whether any notice is taken of them or not, they do prove one thing. We count. Mass opinion is important At the moment, it is all mass ignorance; but if it were mass knowledge. . .  If the people refused to chew gum, or take plastic spoons with their detergent powder, if they said a unanimous No to supersonic aircraft, all these things would have to stop.

There is one obvious qualification to this. If ever people got around to thinking like that, they would almost certainly be on the verge of saying the biggest-ever No. They would be about to say No to capitalism itself, to its grisly experiments, its cynical posturings and its ruthless degradations. There is a moral in this for us all, for the deafened folk of Oklahoma, for the canvassed, sampled, classified, humiliated people of the world.

Stop wriggling and get off that pin.

Ivan.

Space in British Aerospace (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The view is widely held that workers in the aircraft industry are somehow cosseted from the worst effects of booms and slumps in the economic cycle; the fact that, until very recently, the industry in Britain had apparently been little affected by the current recession gave some support to the idea. The truth, however, is that the fortunes of the industry fluctuate just as much as those of any other in the capitalist economy, as those aircraft workers involved in such recent traumas as the TSR2 cancellation will testify.

One of the reasons for this is the sheer size of the product, the design timescale of which has escalated tremendously in the industry’s comparatively short life. Nowadays the time from drawing board to entry into service can be twelve years or more, which means that a vast expenditure over a long period is required before there can be any hope of a profit. The necessary funding has therefore increasingly been provided by government agencies, so making the industry more and more susceptible to the political climate. Charles Gardner, in his history of the British Aircraft Corporation (Batsford, 1981), maintains that in 1970 Wedgwood Benn, Minister of Technology in the Labour Government, would have approved the loan requested by BAC for the 311 airliner, but the Tory government which was elected that year had other ideas. Similarly, a large defence contract signed with Libya in 1968, centring about Thunderbird and Rapier, was terminated after a military coup the following year. The main factors which influence these government decisions are thus not necessarily economic: the industry has suffered severe setbacks in times of general expansion and, conversely, has until recently expanded its workload in some areas in the face of recession.

Further political influences have been introduced as a result of international co-operation in the building of new aircraft. From such has come, among others, the Anglo-French Concorde, the European Airbus Industry and, in the military field, the Anglo-French Jaguar and Anglo-German-Italian Tornado. Amalgamation within the industry has also proceeded with breakneck speed. In Britain at the end of World War II there were 27 different aerospace companies; by 1960 the development of the industry, with some government pushing, had reduced these to only two — British Aircraft Corporation and Hawker Siddley, each with their aircraft and guided weapons divisions. The subsequent amalgamation into British Aerospace, involving so-called “nationalisation" followed by “denationalisation", will be considered later. The development of joint projects with European concerns is a natural continuation of the amalgamation process. If the separate governments concerned could always agree on all matters affecting the projects, perhaps no additional uncertainties would be injected. Under capitalism however such an idyllic situation cannot be expected. Differences between the partners have appeared in connection with all the projects just mentioned. Currently some French interests are pressing for the abandonment of Concorde, whereas earlier it was the French government, who had committed Air France to the plane, which resisted waverers on the British side. All these political factors increase the feeling of insecurity within the industry.

Running parallel with the amalgamation of the companies, and arising from the same economic causes, has been a change in the nature of the work itself. On the production side automation has proceeded much as in engineering in general. Big changes have taken place on the design side also, with the old type of boffin little in evidence. Computer aided design and the large structural analysis programmes now available have taken most of the glamour out of the process. Each worker can now be assigned routine, boring tasks. One effect has been to increase the militancy among designers as the apparent differences between them and workers on the factory floor are eroded. Another is that it is now possible to stress complicated structures more uniformly than before. Under the constant competitive pressure to reduce weight and cost, aircraft are being produced which have smaller safety margins, and this is reflected in an increasing number of fatigue problems.

The current recession is having its effect on the industry despite appearances to the contrary. Although Keynesian economic theories are still quite widely upheld, particularly in France and in the British Labour Party, governments have generally reacted to a slump by trying to reduce their expenditure, as was done in Britain in the 1930s. On defence, the commitment to Trident reduces the amount available for other projects. Another factor is that contractors whose markets in the civil sector have shrunk are delivering defence goods faster and presenting bills for payment more quickly than anticipated. In fact, there has been no overall reduction in defence spending and the 3 per cent increase promised to NATO may well be kept. But even with an increase in defence spending jobs can be lost, as Herman Rebhan, General Secretary of the International Metalworkers’ Federation, made clear when he addressed the United Nations.

There has been a steady increase in military spending in the United States in the past five years. In 1975 there were 97,300 members of the machinists union employed on military contracts. By 1978 there were 85,000, a drop of 12,300. It is because military production operates at the very fringe of technological development. Military industries are both capital intensive and technologically highly advanced. Both aspects mean a decline in labour. Even with a massive new twist in the arms race the military industry is the worst place in which to invest with a view to creating jobs.

(Tridents into Ploughshares by Bill Niven, New Statesman, 12.6.81)

The British Government, having earlier resisted the efforts of West Germany to cut back on Tornado production, is now having second thoughts, possibly reflecting a toughening attitude following the recent Cabinet reshuffle. At the same time British Aerospace has been forced to ask for aid on interest payments to enable it to continue as a partner in the Airbus project. These cashflow problems are threatening to strangle at birth the latest aircraft to appear on the drawing board, the P106/P110 (information on this project can be obtained from an article in The Times, 22.4.81 by the air correspondent Arthur Reed). The Lancashire Evening Post (15.9.81) reports that the Tory Conference would be lobbied in an attempt to save the enterprise.

How is the workforce in British Aerospace reacting to this escalating uncertainty? Some of the younger workers have gone on contract work, mainly in the United States. This offers high rates of pay in the short term, often enabling them to accumulate some savings. However, it does nothing to banish insecurity or lack of job satisfaction; indeed these are rather intensified — contract workers at Boeing have been on as little as one hour’s notice. It is noteworthy that the AV8B contract with McDonnell Douglas was presented on the British media (BBC1 9 o 'clock News, 24.8.81) in terms of the number of jobs it would “secure”. This would not have happened in the United States, where the effect on company profitability may have been stressed but “job security” is not considered possible. Attempts by British Aerospace workers to “do something about it” are confined to fights for a change in government policy. Despite the lip service now being paid to disarmament, this can lead to open advocacy of increased arms expenditure. The slogan “Jobs not bombs" has a hollow ring to these people because to them, bombs and bombers are jobs. The recent cancellation of Skyflash II and delays to the Sea Eagle programme in the 1981 Defence Estimates caused 600 redundancies at the Hatfield and Lostock (near Boston) missile plants. The New Statesman (12.6.81) reports that immediately shop stewards went to lobby Parliament to openly urge the continuation of these projects. The Chairman of Vickers combined shop stewards committee summed this feeling up when he said on television earlier this year: “We don’t sec anything else that could secure full employment. We would welcome five Tridents on our slipways” (New Statesman, 12.6.81). Behind all this activity is the old illusion that capitalism contrary to its nature, can somehow be run in the workers’ interests.

The forced amalgamation of BAC and Hawker Siddley in 1977, to form the “nationalised” British Aerospace, followed this year by "denationalisation” in the form of a public limited company, has introduced another red herring. Not even the most starry-eyed Leftie among the employees can argue that his position as a wage slave has been in any way altered by these changes. Indeed, management in both cases issued statements making clear that terms of employment would remain unchanged. Yet among those active in the trade unions and reformist politics there is still strong support for the nationalisation concept. These workers do not understand that nationalised industries under capitalism are intended to provide a service to the capitalist class as a whole, and are administered in this way by the state, “the executive committee of the ruling class”.

The present discussion on arms conversion and alternative products must not be confused with the position of future socialist society deciding how best to make use of available resources. In the latter case, arms production of all kinds will have ceased and things will be produced solely for use and not for sale with a view to profit. With production geared to satisfying human needs and free access to all goods and services, a decision to cut back on articles no longer required could not menace anybody’s livelihood; a complete contrast to the situation under capitalism. Most of those now discussing “alternatives” believe that disarmament is perfectly feasible under capitalism. While this is manifest nonsense, it does not follow that these ideas can be totally dismissed. We have already seen that increased arms production cannot always prevent contraction in the workforce employed. Also, both the United States and Russia have more than enough arms stockpiled to knock each other out. They could severely limit arms production and still retain this capability, although there is admittedly no sign of such a reduction right now. It is possible however to envisage the capitalists faced with the very difficult problem of unused resources formerly employed on arms production, and needing to convert these to other uses with the minimum of social unrest. The position of the Labour Party, as declared in their latest manifesto, is that

A Labour government will plan to ensure that savings in military expenditure do not lead to unemployment for those working in the defence industries. We shall give material support and encouragement to plans for industrial conversion so that the valuable resources of the defence industries can be used for the production of socially needed goods.

In the United States these ideas have been carried a stage further. A Defence Economic Adjustment Act has actually been introduced into the Senate (Congressional Record, volume 125, No. 50, 26.4.79), the principal sponsors being George McGovern and Charles Mathias. (The first Bill on these lines was put to Congress as early as 1963.) It legislates for the social problems resulting from the arms race. Professor Seymour Mellman, co-chairman of the peace organisation Sane, is quoted: “Economic conversion is the only way of reconciling fear of job loss with opposition to the arms race” (New Statesman, 12.6. 81).

Despite the optimistic phraseology in the wording of the Bill and by some of its supporters, suggesting belief that capitalism can disarm itself, such an Act never be more than a capitalist answer to one of capitalism’s problems. As for “socially needed goods”, even in the deepest recession a little cash could doubtless be found for a pilot scheme to produce a few of these. The problem, as shown by such absurdities as the butter mountain, is how to sell these goods once they are produced. It is this vital point that the Left and other well-meaning reformers seem unable to grasp.

E. C. Edge

Pathfinders: Boeing: out in the cold (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

After nearly three months on the International Space Station, two astronauts are to be marooned there until next February as their proposed transport home, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, remains out of service after a host of thruster failures, software glitches, parachute problems and helium leaks. The astronauts are being philosophical about it, but Boeing will be aggrieved at losing credibility points to its arch-rival NASA co-contractor, the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which will now take on the responsibility for bringing the astronauts home (tinyurl.com/3bj3ua2t).

Boeing is fast becoming a byword for ‘omnishambles’ with a recent history that showcases just how capitalist competition and corporate profit-chasing can result in highly uncreative destruction.

When Boeing swallowed up the last of its US aviation rivals in the 1990s, it saw the chance to adopt a less product-oriented and more shareholder-focused and monopolistic approach which sought to maximise returns by outsourcing not just part production but the cost of part development too, while also extorting price reductions. This put the squeeze on suppliers, who were faced with a Hobson’s Choice of a bad deal or no deal at all. But outsourcing creates complexity, and this compartmentalised approach on the wide-bodied 787 Dreamliner resulted in delays and overruns and never delivered the savings expected (tinyurl.com/fsmbd8mz).

While Boeing wrestled with a problem of its own making, its major European rival, the joint venture Airbus, announced the re-engined narrow-body A320neo, which it claimed could cut fuel use by up to 35 percent. This caused consternation at Boeing, whose 50-year-old 737 had previously dominated the core-segment single-aisle market. To compete, Boeing really needed a brand new plane, but the lead-time to mass production of an all-new design, outsourced or not, would be far too long, and Boeing were already haemorrhaging buyers to Airbus. So bosses resorted to the least-worst option, to re-engine the 737. Morgan Stanley said of this ‘reactionary’ solution, ‘Boeing’s hasty decision to re-engine the B737 is a clear indication of the success and strong competitive positioning of the A320neo’ while another business analyst was ‘astounded at the Airbus smackdown’ (tinyurl.com/36rkdsrr).

Enter the 737 MAX. But when you put new and bigger engines on a 100-ton aircraft they alter its centre of gravity and flight characteristics. Normally this would necessitate costly flight simulator retraining and recertification of pilots. Instead Boeing used a background software fix known as the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which altered the plane’s rear flaps in response to sensor signals. As long as it worked properly, they reasoned, the pilots didn’t need to know about it. So Boeing did not tell them about MCAS or include it in the pilot manual. The Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t too worried, despite whistleblower allegations of its regulatory capture by Boeing, and agreed with the company to give pilots just an hour of training on an iPad, without mentioning MCAS. Boeing weren’t worried either. They had calculated the likelihood of a ‘major failure’ (one not resulting in the loss of a plane, which is termed ‘catastrophic’) as once in every 223 trillion flight hours – around 2 billion years of annual MAX fleet service (tinyurl.com/549z2ahj).

In the event they had two catastrophic failures in less than 6 months. The sensors and control panel light didn’t work properly, and pilots did not know about MCAS or how to override it when it malfunctioned. In October 2018 a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed in the Java Sea, killing all 189 people. Airily dismissing this as ground crew and pilot incompetence, Boeing announced record $100bn earnings the following January. But in March 2019 an Ethiopian Airlines MAX 8 also fell out of the sky, killing all 157 on board. Clearly this was no coincidence, and Boeing immediately saw its orders, stock prices and reputation plummet. Its CEO promptly resigned, though with a cosy retirement package of $80m in stock options (tinyurl.com/498cvau4), and the new CEO issued a mea culpa to the US Senate, accepting the company’s responsibility for the deaths and agreeing to pay compensation and submit to regulators.

And then, despite all the regulation, a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in January this year, because bolts were missing. How could this happen? Multiple whistleblowers had faced company reprisals after drawing attention to falsified inspection reports and a string of unsafe practices due to cost-cutting and inadequate staff training. In July Boeing pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy after being found to violate the terms of the regulatory agreement, meaning the company now has a criminal record (tinyurl.com/mv4av7m2).

On top of that, Boeing workers have been on strike against a union-busting and bullying culture, pay rates that have not increased in 16 years as the cash-strapped company grinds down on its own workforce, and ‘panic mode’ as managers hound staff to keep quiet over quality concerns (tinyurl.com/ysjh9mnc).

Now Boeing has $60bn of debt and is ‘one level above being potentially downgraded to non-investment grade status – junk status’. But nobody wants Boeing to collapse, not the airlines, who are faced with a global shortage of aircraft and fear an Airbus monopoly even more than the current Boeing-Airbus duopoly, and not the US government, which relies on Boeing’s aerospace defence arm and fears market capture by a major Chinese competitor like Comac (Economist, 20 June).

Airbus has seen A220-300 engine failures, diversions, groundings and supply chain problems but no crashes, and its stock has gone up, not down. The story of Boeing shows what can happen when market competition tightens the screws, and things like quality control, adequate training, product performance and company honesty begin to crack and splinter. Accidents will still happen in non-market socialism, but not because someone is eyeing the balance sheet instead of the safety inspection reports.

Meanwhile the astronauts continue to float in the ISS, patiently above it all. Compared to what many others have suffered at Boeing’s hands, they might consider themselves lucky only to be left out in the cold.

Paddy Shannon

News in Review: The Profumo affair (1963)

The News in Review column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Profumo affair

It was in the May Socialist Standard, at a time when Mr. Profumo’s strenuous protestations of the innocence of his relationships with Christine Keeler still held public water, that we pointed out how unimportant are the personal morals of the administrators of capitalism.

Now that Profumo has come clean, and now that we have been treated to the squalid detail of the Argyll divorce case, what we said in May still stands. With something to be added.

The rather nasty stories have lifted a corner of the curtain on a life which is completely foreign to most workers.

The life of rich houses, glamorous holidays, expensive women and powerful men. Of easy luxury and sophistication. The life, in fact, of people who can dedicate their lives to what they conceive as living.

Which is something very foreign to most members of the working class, who are only the people who make possible the lives of luxury and glamour.

Profumo was a member of a capitalist government and capitalism teaches us, when we are children in school and when we are grown up enough to read its journalism, that the basis of morality is monogamy.

Many workers absorb this teaching and, no matter what it costs them in terms of personal strain, conform to it. Others conform because they cannot afford to do anything else. Promiscuity can be a costly business.

It can also be a tragic business, for workers. Only recently The Observer ran a series on illegitimate children in this country, which showed up the sadness of many unmarried mothers who are forced by their circumstances to give up their babies when they desperately want to keep them.

This sort of tragedy need never happen to rich people who are also promiscuous. They have no trouble in taking care of any number of children, 'legitimate" or no.

In more ways than one, capitalism is a sordid, inhuman social system in which only the ruling class are free.

War in the air

The early railways fought each other tooth and nail for freight and passengers, often taking enormous physical and economic risks in the process. In the same way, the great airlines are currently coming to grips over the pickings to be had on the world’s busy airlanes.

For some time, the American transatlantic carriers have been fighting the rest —and particularly Britain—over fares and cargo rates. This provoked the recent crisis in which British airports were on the point of being closed to Pan American and Trans World aircraft; something which was averted only when the American Civil Aviation Board made a temporary climb down. The situation remains threatening.

And now the war is hotting up in the freight carriers.

BOAC has been happily operating piston engined freighters across the Atlantic and had no immediate intention of spending any more millions on jets to speed up this service.

This intention has been upset by Pan American’s opening of the first all jet freight service, over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fast and capacious, the Boeing freighters have started an air cargo sales war which may, as in the case of passenger traffic, develop into a rate war.

If this happens, we shall probably see every airline which aspires to a place in the sun on the transatlantic run being forced to buy aircraft which they cannot afford, do not want, and which they often have to send off only half full of cargo. We may see countless aircraft which have plenty of useful life in them being scrapped or sold off for a song. And perhaps we shall see the airlines taking the same sort of physical risks which the primitive, battling railways took.

Competition, we are often being told, is one of capitalism’s health-giving substances. In fact, just like the other features of the all-wasteful society, it is a ludicrous way of running human affairs.

Advertising for votes

Do you vote for capitalism? You do?

Well, how does it feel like to be in somebody’s sights? You should know —both the big parties are now drawing a bead on you.

You have probably seen the big spread ads. which the Tories have been taking in the papers. You have probably heard that the Labour Party is indignant about where the money comes from, and you may have reflected that this argument has lost a lot of its point since Labour started putting out its own big ads.

These are part of a very expensive 
campaign. And it is all aimed at you.

The Tory ads. are punchy, with facts and figures about the roads they will lay down, the hospitals they will put up, and so on. If only, that is, you will give them the chance. Has it struck you as strange that after twelve years of Conservative paradise there are still no new hospitals in this country and the roads are still in a mess?

The Labour ads. are perhaps rather more airy, with some distant ideals of justice and equality—and Mr. Wilson just caught in the act of almost giving the new Labour thumbs-up sign. Labour has to go easy on the facts and figures. Their own record is pretty awful and to say too emphatically that there is anything wrong with Britain today leaves them open to the countercharge of running down the old country, dammit. That wouldn’t go down with a patriotic voter like you, would it? So Labour puts in the plea that everything could be all right. If only you give them the chance.

And will you? The big parties are lashing out the thousands in an effort to persuade you to put them in charge of British capitalism. But whoever gets that job will make no difference; the black spots which capitalism makes will remain unerased.

The tragedy is that the ballyhoo, the big splash, is what so often counts.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain cannot afford expensive publicity campaigns and indeed has to bleed itself merely to run one or two candidates in an election. Yet only Socialism can give us the sane world which most people, somehow, are looking for.

Remember that, when you read the next big ad. Remember it when you vote. They’ve got you in their sights but, in a way, you are the one who pulls the trigger.

The Pope is dead

Pope John died when, just before the Profumo scandal burst, news was in short supply. Especially the juicy "human interest” sort of news on which the popular press thrives. On thin rations, the papers made the most of the drawn out death agonies. Some of the headlines were almost ghoulish.

This gave us a peep at one of the nastiest sides of capitalism—the side which works for a profit out of human suffering, even when it is the suffering of one of the great upholders of property society.

Not only reporters rushed to say nice things about John XXIII. Bertrand Russell, a professed non-believer, echoed the popular estimation of the dead Pontiff as a man of peace:

The Pope used his office and his energy to bring peace and to oppose policies which lead to war and mass murder. His encyclical is a magnificent statement of the deepest wishes and hopes of all men of decency. . . I mourn his death.

There is, indeed, some rather tenuous evidence that the dead Pope was prepared to act as some sort of a go-between in a new world carve-up by the United States and Russia. This is the sort of diplomatic dabbling which often qualifies all sorts of people for the description of "peace loving.”

But this holds good only in peacetime. We know that, just like his predecessors, the Pope would have done nothing to oppose a future war and that in such a war there could well be Catholics on both sides, killing each other.

Thus does capitalism make warriors of them all.

In any case, modern war has nothing to do with a supposed lack of men of peace among the world’s leaders. Capitalism itself causes war and the leaders always go along on the tide of destruction.

And let all peace lovers remember that capitalism has always done well out of the servile ignorance of the religious, and especially of the Church of which John XXIII was so briefly the Vicar Supreme.

Postscript on housing

Of all the people to write a postscript to the special issue of the Socialist Standard on housing last May, it had to be the Minister of Housing himself, Sir Keith Joseph.

The last few days of that month gave birth to yet another White Paper which is supposed to be going to solve the housing problem. (“. . . promises,” commented The Observer, “borne on fairly insubstantial wings.”)

The new plan is to give housing subsidies only where the government thinks they are needed. Thus is quietly killed off the old policy (which was also going to solve the problem) of giving subsidies virtually indiscriminately. How long before the latest plan is pronounced to have failed?

There will be a bit more entertainment from the government’s financial jugglers; £100 million is intended to be available to encourage the building of houses for rent. From the merry shouts of welcome which greeted this announcement, nobody would have thought that these were the very policies which, in one form or another, have failed so blatantly in the past.

And, of course, the government will be speeding up slum clearance and will build more houses. The happy day when everyone will be living in what Housing Ministers think is a decent home has had to be postponed for a bit more, what with all this planning. Actually, it has been put off for another ten years. Said Sir Keith:

This programme will within 10 years transform the country's housing position, and will bring within reach of nearly every citizen in the land either a modern or a modernised house.

Presumably the Tories are hoping to win a few votes on this programme. Perhaps they will. It would not be the first time the working class have been hopelessly deceived about one of the ways in which capitalism blights their lives.