What 'peace dividend'? (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many workers believe—or, until the Gulf crisis, believed—that with the end of the Cold War peace has broken out and that as a consequence the demand for war weapons has gone into a permanent decline, so that the money spent on them can be directed to improving living standards and the industries producing them converted to peaceful purposes.

Talk of this so-called “peace dividend" began following Gorbachov’s speech at the United Nations at the end of 1988, since when there has allegedly been “no enemy in Europe". Tom King, the Defence Secretary said as much in a statement to Parliament on 18 June last year justifying reductions in defence spending. Then in July, as part of the defence review, he announced the cancellation of an order for 33 Tornado aircraft for the RAF. British Aerospace responded by announcing a cut of 800 in their manning on Tornado assembly. This was followed up by the announcement in November of a "restructuring” involving a cut of about 20 per cent in staff and the closure of two large sites, in Kingston and Preston. Again the recent changes in eastern Europe were cited as a factor. The future of the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA), already hazy, has become more doubtful still following German reunification and the resulting reassessment of German military requirements.

Arms still in demand

This is not a new situation. The demand for arms fell temporarily after the Boer War and after both World Wars. In 1902 and 1918 workers lost their jobs as a result. There were also campaigns for diversification and the manufacture of alternative products at armament plants such as Woolwich Arsenal, which had little success despite some support from local councils and chambers of commerce. In 1945, while there was again a temporary slump in arms production, capitalism went into a boom phase which minimised the disruption. In none of these cases, however, had peace broken out. Indeed in 1945, following the defeat of the Axis powers, two new aggressive power blocs formed immediately and the demand for military equipment duly recovered.

This conflict—the Cold War—has now come to an end, at least temporarily. The main reason for this has been the need for Russia to take time out to give urgent attention to its ailing economy. But the basic cause of war, the struggle of competing capitalist rivals for raw materials, trade routes, markets and strategic areas, remains untouched. This may cause the Cold War blocs to re-form at some future date. Or future superpower conflicts may increasingly take the form of local wars on the Korean and Vietnam lines, as this in theory reduces the chances of a nuclear holocaust which would be an overkill even from the capitalist viewpoint. The danger of such a holocaust, however, will remain as long as capitalism does. None of these scenarios, needless to say, in any way remotely resembles peace.

The truth of this is underlined by the current Gulf crisis and the Iran-Iraq war which preceded it. This conflict is so brazenly a struggle for control of the world’s oil supplies as to be reminiscent of the period prior to World War 1, before so-called "communism” and fascism arose to be used to mask the true cause of capitalism’s wars. Indeed so clearly does this current conflict illustrate the truth that further comment would appear superfluous.

Patriotic unions

The current "crisis" in the arms industry (notice how any suggestion of peace leads to talk of a crisis!) will not prove lasting. That does not mean that the working class, through the trade unions, should not do all they can to minimise the effect of the present downturn. Just as pressure to defend real wage levels can succeed, because the cost to the capitalist of a strike may he greater than that of conceding, so for a similar reason redundancies may be reduced, by determined militant action, below the original figure demanded by the employers. Socialists fully support and participate in such efforts.

However, what we have been seeing from the trade unions goes far beyond this and is not acceptable from the socialist viewpoint. Basically it amounts to an attempt to reform capitalism in order, so they hope, to keep their members in employment. MP's are lobbied, the capitalist government is approached, searches are made for other possible sources of investment and if found support for them is asked for. The unions have even been demanding that the government revoke its cancellation of the Tornado order!

That is not to say that such attempts are doomed to failure. By and large, however, they come from an attitude in which fantastic and utterly useless remedies are being put forward, something that is not confined to armaments workers of course. Sometimes sections of the capitalist class lend some support if they see a prospect of profit, but it will of course be support on capitalist conditions, which cannot be of any real benefit to the working class.

We can see in such thinking a reflection of the attitude of the Labour Party to which the unions are unfortunately still wedded. The Labour Party is mainly composed of workers who believe that Labour politicians can run capitalism better than the capitalists. The example of Solidarity in Poland, originally a trade union, but which sprouted a political wing that now forms a government which is enforcing draconian austerity measures ought to serve as a warning to the super-reformist (and often super-patriotic) British trade unionists who are so numerous in the aircraft industry.

There can be no compromise with capitalism, and no matter how desperate the short-term situation may be, workers should not entertain such ideas. What may look on the surface to be just a compromise, will always prove in the end to have been surrender.

E. C. Edge

Editorial: The Powder Trust and Peace. (1909)

Editorial from the January 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

We cull the following curious note from the daily paper of December 14th.

“The Powder Trust as an agency for the prevention of war was the curious anomaly disclosed in the Federal investigation into the Gunpowder Trade Association just concluded at Cleveland, Ohio.

The members of the Trust declared they possessed the power to obviate war by refusing the supply of gunpowder to the nations. As late as 1905 the firms constituting the Trust bound themselves under a heavy penalty to make no sales to Governments without the consent of all the firms. They also fixed the price at which the Governments might acquire powder, thus establishing the fact that ‘the nations of the world are the playthings of a Trust.”

As in most bourgeois reasoning, however, there is an important flaw in the above association of the Powder Trust with peace. Peace means bad trade to a powder Trust. War means good trade and high profits. The Powder Trust is formed, not for philanthropy, but for high profits. It wants to increase the use of gunpowder, hence the very economic basis of the Powder Trust clearly determines that it shall, like the army, the navy, the makers of artillery, etc., throw the whole of such influence as it possesses against peace and in favour of war. Whatever good intentions the members of the Powder Trust might have, they all vanish before material interests, and even on the subject of good intentions one is forcibly reminded of the concentrated cant and humbug of the “peace” conferences at the Hague.

So They Say: Protests too much (1977)

The So They Say Column from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Protests too much

An article in The Spectator of 12th November entitled “The irrelevance of class” which attempts to justify its title by showing how various important men have risen from what are discreetly referred to as “humble births”, reminds us that the class war still prompts professional hacks (and quacks) to issue it, at regular intervals with a formal death certificate. The entire irrelevance of class structure within society led the writer of the article to over 50 column-inches to make his point and if The Spectator is prepared to pay for and publish this sort of thing, we have high hopes for our own submission entitled “The irrelevance of air—hot and cold.”

The inconvenient obstacle to the claim however is one of fact. Obstacles of this nature may or may not impress Spectator’s writers who are prepared to spend a good deal of time apparently in dealing with what they consider “irrelevances”, but it cannot seriously be denied that capitalist society is divided, on the one hand into those who own and control the means of life and on the other, into those who must work for a member of the owning class in order to live. If this class division were non-existent, or irrelevant, we could only express surprise at the great deal of verbiage mustered to assure us of the claim.

Not cricket

Although the owning class as a whole have class interests in common, namely the retention of private- property society and they will unite on issues which may threaten this, each member also has individual interests in the day-to-day business of increasing their particular share of the social wealth, and this process obliges them to enter into battles among themselves. Whereas the working class, the non-owners, represent a class enemy to be held off by a variety of means, other members of the capitalist class are rivals and as such require direct attention.

Fresh diplomatic protests have been tendered by the Government over breaches in agreements by Japanese (Motor) manufacturers to hold down sales in Britain.

(Daily Telegraph, 10th November 77)

The British motor manufacturers claim that the Japanese are carrying out an “invasion” of the British markets contrary to an undertaking given by the Japanese to restrain sales to the UK. It all sounds very reasonable—an arrangement between friends. The Japanese motor men have argued before that it had all been a misunderstanding and they may well do so again. The fact that the British government now argues the case on behalf of its own national manufacturers shows that they are not deceived. Both parties are aware that “undertakings” are weak restraints on the pressures of capitalist expansion.

Making the point, in the same newspaper, was the Chairman of the Welsh council of the CBI who advises his members that British manufacturers can satisfactorily meet Japanese competition by putting in “the same intensity of effort as the Japanese”, by which he means a greater degree of exploitation of the British working class. This gentleman was speaking from experience. He is the chairman of a machine-tool company.

Last year I put one Japanese firm out of business and two other Japanese firms have given up their markets to me.

(Daily Telegraph, 10th November 77)

It seems probable that the aforementioned Japanese firms may be petitioning him soon to give an “undertaking” for restraint.

Plenty of problems

The Japanese Prime Minister has become increasingly concerned at the economic problems he faces as the yen rises against other currencies and the exporters are finding it more difficult to compete successfully in overseas markets. He now refers to exports as a “negligible factor in expanding economic growth in future.” The new strategy he revealed is to be the stimulation of home demand by increasing public spending, which we seem to have heard somewhere before.

Mr. Fukuda neatly put his finger on one of the major difficulties facing the Japanese, who are by no means alone in the matter, and shows that capitalism, despite the efforts of so-called planning, simply continues to produce problems and contradictions. The profit motive governs production.

The important thing is to create demand in the midst of the problems of overcapacity and unemployment.

(The Times, 11th November 77)

Capitalist ideologies

The Chinese are said to have approached the British government with a view to ordering Harrier jump-jets. Apparently the so-called socialists are faced with a build up of forces on their border with the other so-called socialists, the Russians. The fact that the British government also refers to itself as “socialist” no doubt lends justification to the approach and completes the picture of this happy socialist band who act so differently from the capitalist governments. To an un-trained eye it would appear to be a straightforward business arrangement.

However Britain is a member of a NATO organization called Cocom whose function is to prevent the sale of weapons and plant for producing them, to “communist” countries. America is also a member and it might be thought that they would, as they are entitled, veto consideration of the order. Surely the Americans would not permit any hole-in-the-wall arrangement between all these “socialists". It appears however that the Americans have an un-trained eye in the matter. They have their reasons too.

The fact that there is a company to company agreement between Hawker Siddeley and Macdonald Douglas to manufacture the Harrier under licence in no way interferes with the sale of the Harrier by Britain to other states, I was authoritatively informed yesterday. A non-British member of Cocom’s coordinating committee told me a few days ago that the United States rarely raised any objection to the export of strategic materials to a Communist country if it was produced or manufactured in America.

(Daily Telegraph, 9th November 77)

Labour’s Department of War (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people are surprised and disappointed by Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Yet, it is a typical Labour government. Fundamentally, it is a belief in state action to co-ordinate the market economy that characterises them in power. Thankfully, any association between this belief and socialism has long since been dispelled.

Indeed, to their credit, this government is faithfully carrying out the objects set out in the Labour Party’s rulebook, which commits the Party to work for:

‘A DYNAMIC ECONOMY, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and cooperation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high-quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them’ (Clause IV.2.A).

And:

‘Labour is committed to the defence and security of the British people and to cooperating in European institutions, the United Nations, the Commonwealth and other international bodies to secure peace, freedom, democracy, economic security and environmental protection for all’ (Clause IV.3).

No-one can pretend that the present Labourites have not been up-front with this commitment, at least: anyone voting for them without illusions should have known.

We can see this in action in the way that Downing Street announced the UK taking part in the NATO agreement to spend 5 percent of GDP on Defence.

‘Marking a step change with the approach of previous governments, the National Security Strategy directly answers to the concerns of working people, aligning our national security objectives and plans for economic growth in a way not seen since 1945’.

The reference to ‘working people’ is labour-washing this strategy, which will be about making phenomenal amounts of profit for defence contractors and arms manufacturers. As the NATO press release on the agreement notes:

‘Research and development (R&D) costs are included in defence expenditure. R&D costs also include expenditure for those projects that do not successfully lead to production of equipment’.

This is the NATO agreed definition of defence expenditure. The agreement is for this figure to reach 3.5 percent of member states’ GDP, with an additional 1.5 percent of GDP to be spent:

‘annually to inter alia protect critical infrastructure, defend networks, ensure civil preparedness and resilience, innovate, and strengthen the defence industrial base’.

So, NATO states are preparing to fiddle the figures by defining as much as they can as defence expenditure (see for example rumours Italy is looking at designating a transport bridge as defence expenditure).

Of course, the US has long done this, with a substantial veterans benefit system: spending about $300 billion annually, 90 percent of which is split between income support for veterans (including pensions) and medical costs. This is itself part of the economic conscription of workers to fight in the armed forces for the people who own the country.

Starmer’s government wants to use its military spend as part of its drive to generate planned profits for capitalists through that ‘dynamic economy.’ According to the MOD 463,000 jobs (about 1 in 60) are supported by the defence industry (that includes 272,000 jobs supported by military spending – 151,000 directly and 121,000 indirectly) on top of the 181,890 serving military personnel.

However, as the Institute for Government notes:

‘The single largest cost to the MoD is the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, which is responsible for the procurement, maintenance and disposal of the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet. This was allocated 38% of the 2023-2033 Equipment Plan, or 20% of total defence spending’.

That is, maintaining the UK’s capacity to launch a nuclear device at any nation in the world. Interestingly, they also note that:

‘Most additional UK defence funding between 2015/16 and 2023/24 was allocated to capital spending, to acquire or maintain fixed assets like equipment and land. This element of spending increased by 95.5% in real terms over this period’.

Depending on how you count it, the UK is the 5th or 6th biggest-spending military country in the world. This expenditure is necessary to give continued diplomatic clout.

This comes at a cost. Those tens of thousands of service personnel are removed from the workforce and from doing any potentially useful work (neither generating profits for capitalists, nor creating use values for the community).

The jobs and industries supported by defence spending do produce profits for the companies involved, but those profits are essentially transfers from elsewhere, as they are paid for by taxes extracted from the profits of other capitalists.

Defence does bring in some profit. ‘UK arms exports: Statistics’, a House of Commons report from July this year notes that ‘the UK won defence orders worth £14.5 billion in 2023. This is a 39 percent increase in real terms on the previous year’. Over 50 percent of this was aerospace. This would represent a poor return on all that defence investment, but in fact it also reflects the UK geostrategic interests, as shown by where the sales went to:

‘Europe was the largest market for UK defence exports, accounting for 34% of total exports over this period, followed by the Middle East (32%), North America (18%), the Asia Pacific (7%), Latin America and Africa (both 1%). The remaining share (8%) was exported to a mixed or unidentified region’.

There are other defence spin-offs in terms of new technologies. The recently published government document, ‘Defence industrial strategy: making defence an engine for growth’ notes: ‘The Spending Review confirmed that MOD’s research and development budget will be over £2 billion in 2026-27 and will rise each year’. This includes a mandate to spend 10 percent of the MOD’s procurement on novel technologies, including AI-driven solutions.

Finding new and inventive ways to kill people seems a very roundabout way of creating wealth, but it is a way which has to exist in a society characterised by a tiny minority controlling the productive resources at the expense of the majority.

Pik Smeet

The Menace of Aerial Warfare (1936)

From the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

(The following article contains a very full examination of the effects of aerial bombing on large centres of population. This writer is not yet a member of the party, but in view of the present importance of the subject, and the support the information gives to the Socialist attitude to war, we have decided in this instance to suspend our rule against including articles by non-members.

There may perhaps be some exaggeration of the probable effects of modern warfare, but on this the reader can form his own judgment from the facts set down. One thing is certain— the effects of another war on a large scale, with the weapons now available, hardly bear thinking about.

Ed. Comm.)

Dye Factories as “Merchants of Death."

Prior to 1914 the I.G. (Interessen Gemeinschaft) possessed a virtual monopoly of the world’s dyestuffs industry. In other countries the industry was in a crude and embryo stage of development. To the general reader it may seem a long way from the manufacturer of dyes to the “merchant of death”—so far, indeed, that this industry has not yet figured, as it deserves, in any of the recent enquiries into the arms traffic. It must remain undisputed, however, that all the motives of the manufacturer of guns, shells, aeroplanes and tanks, in keeping war to the forefront as an instrument of policy, must apply with equal force, to the manufacturer of dyestuffs.

The next war will find the Yorkshire dye factories the most important manufacturers of weapons of offence in England.

When considering all the information made available after the last War had ended, it seems certain that the I.G. played the major part in prolonging the German resistance and, furthermore, had the strategic advantages of this enormous plant been fully realised, the War would have terminated in a German victory by the end of 1915. That she did not understand is now history.

When the first shock of surprise was over, and the immense advantage gained by the German’s use of chlorine was not followed up, the manufacture of poison gas was started in England and France, and it was realised that the pre-War monopoly of the dye industry was making possible the large-scale use of poison gas by the German Army.

Dye factories can be changed over to the production of war gases in a very short time. Indeed, most of the gases have a legitimate industrial use in times of peace. It is for the latter reason that it will always be impossible to disarm, so far as gas is concerned.

Before the last War the dye industry was practically non-existent in England and France, and when it became necessary to manufacture mustard gas (dichlorethyl-sulphide) on a scale suitable to the requirements of modern warfare, new plant had to be erected, which, in many respects, was identical with the normal aniline dye plants. It was not until late in the War, after many failures and many casualties, that production was commenced, but, by the Armistice, it was possible for the Allies to boast that they were in a position to “drown the Germans in mustard gas.” If there had been a well-developed dye industry in England or France, the time required to start production could have been reduced by perhaps as much as 95 per cent.

The importance of the dye industry was realised by England during the Great War by reason of these costly and laborious experiments in gas-production, and, in 1919, the import of dyes was prohibited, except under licence from the Board of Trade. That this order was illegal, having regard to the law at that time, led, in 1920, to the Dyestuffs (Import Regulations) Act, which became operative in January, 1921, whereby the import of dyestuffs and intermediates was totally prohibited for ten years except under Government licence. About the same time France, the U.S.A. and Italy created high import duties to foster the development of the industry.

At the close of the year 1918, the world’s capacity to produce dyestuffs was double that of 1914, the figures standing at 300,000 tons.

The following tabulation of the annual production figures for 1929, of the principal manufacturing countries, is of interest:

Germany (tons) 72,000

U.S.A                 38,000

France         16,000

England         15,000

It will be seen that, at this time, the combined production of the three latter countries did not equal that of Germany. The next in order is the U.S.A., with 38,000 tons, and it is significant that the menace of chemical warfare has been realised more fully in the U.S.A. than in any other country, with the exception of Germany. The U.S.A., in addition to encouraging the manufacture of dyestuffs, possess a large factory (the largest of its kind in the world) at Edgewood, devoted to the manufacture of all types of poisonous gases and equipment.

In 1926 the Imperial Chemical Industries (I.C.I.) was formed with a capital of £65,000,000 to take over and co-ordinate the activities of Brunner Mond & Co., Ltd., Nobel Industries, Ltd. ' (manufacturers, among other things, of explosives), United Alkali Co., Ltd., British Dyestuffs Corporation, and a good many others. The ramifications of this huge combine are extensive, but largely unknown. The merger certainly has had the effect of unifying the potential producers of poison gas with the heavy chemical and high-explosives industry.

Nothing is more certain than that we have here a huge plant that could be mobilised at a moment's notice for the production of war material, and would make profit by the prosecution of war. Therefore, even in the absence of proof, the I.C.I. must be suspected, as must every other potential producer of war material on a large scale, of favouring war as a means of settling the international disputes of capitalists.

It cannot be denied that the chemical industry is of enormous benefit to man, but it is also his potential destroyer. Explosives are necessary to human progress, but the I.C.I. is not organised to help human progress.

For my own part I do not think that there is anything particularly dishonourable in the activities of armament makers in general, or this side of the I.C.I.’s business in particular, because they are merely working within the framework of a system or social organisation that determines their business methods. I do not intend this to be an apologia for armourers, but it is indisputable that, during the last year or two, they have been made scapegoats for evils inherent in the profit system, and my purpose is to draw attention to the wider issues involved.

Shortly after the War the I.G. concluded price-controlling agreements with the dye factories of France, Russia and Italy. It is more than possible that there has been some exchange of personnel and formulae. The I.C.I. also hold large blocks of shares in the I.G.

Even a substance so innocent as beet-sugar, the manufacture of which is subsidised by the Government, can be used as the means of producing supplies of glycerine, alcohol, acetone and hydrocyanic acid. Alcohol is a base for the manufacture of cordite, which probably explains what has been a very unprofitable subsidy.

Chlorine, used as a bleach for fabrics, is a war gas that has been largely superseded, but combined with so common a gas as carbon monoxide, it becomes phosgene, the deadliest of the non-persistent lung-irritants, with the power of corroding metals.

In conclusion, it is fair to say that profits can be made in the chemical industry from war, and the profit system being what it is, the industry’s motives must be suspect.

The Aeroplane

It is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.—Stanley Baldwin.

Fighting in the air on a large scale only takes place by accident or by mutual consent.—Air-Marshal Sir R. Brooke-Popham.

CREATE A NEW WINGED ARMY OF LONG-RANGE BRITISH BOMBERS TO SMASH THE FOREIGN HORNETS IN THEIR NESTS.—Hands Off~Britain Air Defence League.

The last quotation is the only answer that has so far been evolved by the present system to the threat of the first two.

The development of the aeroplane since the close of the Great War has been rapid.

Within the last few years we have seen nonstop flights of over 4,000 miles; Australia reached in a little over three days; the Dornier DO X and Soviet aeroplanes to carry over one hundred passengers; aeroplanes annihilating conceptions of space and time remaining to us from quieter days. But we have not yet seen the aeroplane as the destroyer of cities and the slaughterer of millions. Yet, at the present time, this power could be demonstrated at almost any moment. Certainly within a few days.

Unless the people, on whom, ultimately, the power of governments depend, stop thinking in terms of war and think in terms of mass extermination, unless they can force the governments of the world to do something which, so far, has been found impossible, by reason of inordinate self-interest, to do—internationalise civil and military air-fleets, then the present civilisation will become a closed chapter in the history of man’s struggle against barbarism. The collapse that would immediately and inevitably follow the commencement of another war between industrialised countries would be bloodier—more destructive of human life and welfare—than ever before in man’s short history.

Knowing this, Lord Londonderry boasted in the House of Lords (in May, 1935) that he “Had the utmost difficulty, amid the public outcry, in preserving the use of the bombing aeroplane, even on the frontiers of the Middle East and India.” It seems as if Lord Londonderry wishes to immolate the population of our large cities for the convenience of the Indian Army and it is not surprising, therefore, that the Prime Minister should have taken the first possible opportunity to sacrifice him to political expediency.

The standard bomber now in use has an out-and-home range of about 1,000/1,500 miles. Greater range can be attained by substituting extra supplies of petrol for part of the bomb load. The average load is two tons of bombs, in addition to personnel and protective weapons. Fifty tons, a load for twenty-five such aeroplanes, is the quantity necessary, according to the Earl of Halsbury, to destroy every man, woman and child in the London area.

“ Mustard gas,” he says, “is the most deadly of known gases. In an area, say, Richmond to Barking and from Finchley to Streatham, an effective lethal dose would be only forty-two tons. In twelve hours every man, woman and child in that area might fail to live.”

“Fail to live” should be read “subjected to an agonising death.” I am sure that the Earl of Halsbury knows sufficient about the physiological effects of mustard-gas not to object to this trifling emendation.

In December, 1928, Brigadier-General Crozier, writing in the Times, said: —

”During the Great War 380 tons of bombs were dropped in and around London. That quantity could now be delivered in less than twelve hours.”

Although this is quite bad enough, I question the General’s figures. Three hundred and eighty tons is a load for about 200 bombers. I suggest that almost any country within striking distance of London could and would detach a good many more bombers from their air fleet for the important purpose of destroying the city, and could do this without appreciably weakening it. In addition, the large night-flying commercial machine would be very suitable for distributing mustard-gas and lewisite in large quantities. These machines have a lift of from three to six tons, and would require very little structural alteration. Normally they have a low ceiling and a slow speed, but this is not a serious handicap to night bombing, especially if the weather is cloudy.

Air manoeuvres have proved time and again that bombing aeroplanes can gain position over London as and when they like; that they can destroy between dusk and dawn nearly seven million people—almost as many as were killed on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918.

Let me draw a little picture. Towards the end of an evening in 1915 I was sitting in an armchair, reading, when, without warning, a terrific explosion shook the house and blew the window glass into the room. I knew at once that this was an air-raid, the first of the airships to reach London. There were several more explosions followed by silence. Obeying my primary impulse I ran for the cellar, which was an extremely flimsy affair, unlikely to offer much protection, and I knew that the bombs had fallen very close. In the morning I set out to see the damage, and found that, two streets away, most of the houses had been destroyed. I was fortunate enough to see the road before it was closed to the public, and to see for myself the aftermath of an air-raid that was, in relation to the destructive possibilities of modern armament, as a bow-and-arrow to a fifteen-inch gun. The fronts of several houses had been blown out. A bedstead stuck out of one at a sickening angle, the iron contorted into bizarre shapes by the violence of the explosion. The road was covered with debris and rubble, and the surface was gashed and torn. A young man had said “good-night!” to his fiancee, and crossed the road. When I saw the place the body had been removed, but his brains remained as a patch on the wall. I heard, subsequently, that the (inquest verdict was “ Murder against the Kaiser,” an interesting example of war mentality, but of very little use to the dead. 

L. G. Savage.

(To be continued.)

War fair (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

One feature of the Falklands conflict which caused the jingoists to boil over with ill-directed wrath was the fact that some of the armaments used by the Argentine forces had been made in Britain or EEC "partner" countries. Some details are given in a recent New Statesman article by Duncan Campbell, under the extremely confused title of "No Lesson Learnt" (21 June 1981). Campbell tells us how

Ferranti workers in Edinburgh and Manchester made the Isis bombing sights with which the Argentine Skyhawks were fitted . . . Their French counterparts at Bourges made the Exocets. Sterling Armaments of Dagenham sold the Argentines some 100 submachine guns seven years ago, which turned up at Goose Green.

Later in the same article, we learn that Sterling Armaments and Ferranti were among the exhibitors at last month's British Army Equipment Exhibition, a bi-annual international arms sale held at Aldershot. Campbell writes:

In 1976. just three months after we had broken off diplomatic relations .  . . two Argentine generals came to Aldershot. In 1978 ten officers came. In 1980. after the restoration of diplomatic links, five generals visited Britain. The Ministry of Defence even paid their air fares . . . Every other military dictatorship from Turkey to the Americas got the same treatment.

Unexpectedly, no reformist cries for "control" appear in the text, although the title does hint at a belief in such "solutions". On a note of unusual realism. Campbell signs off by saying: "There is no sign from Britain or anywhere else in Europe that the Falklands war will have changed the world of arms dealing”.

Those who express patriotic anger at such revelations are probably unaware that history provides many examples of arms sales to the "enemy", and of those not directly involved in a conflict selling the machines of death to both sides. Even in the Middle Ages, mercenary soldiers took whichever side could offer them employment at the time. After the Industrial Revolution, however, the arms trade gathered pace.

Alfred Nobel, like many of the early giants of this business, was a complex character. Idealist, pacifist and admirer of Shelley (in whose style he enjoyed writing poetry), he was also a ruthless financier obsessed with the science of explosives. He is. of course, best known as the originator of the Nobel Peace Prize, a fitting testament to his contradictory nature: fewer people realise that he was one of the earliest to subscribe to the deterrent theory. At the Berne Peace Congress of 1892 he explained his viewpoint to Bertha von Suttner, Austrian aristocrat, authoress and pacifist, who had earlier applied to be his private secretary: “My factories may end war sooner than your Congress. The day when two army corps can destroy each other in one second, all civilised nations will recoil in horror from war” (The Arms Bazaar, Anthony Sampson). Nobel's nightmare vision of destructive power is now all but come to pass, but with no sign of the response for which he apparently hoped. However this philosophy provided an excellent justification for a man who had made his fortune out of the arms race. Sampson believes that Nobel was Bernard Shaw's model for the character of Andrew Undershaft in his play Major Barbara. Undershaft, however, explicitly rejects the deterrent theory when his son-in-law puts his point of view to him: "I am obliged to you for making the usual excuses for my trade, but I’m ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments". There have been both types in the arms trade. Whether the capitalist provides his own justification or relies on others makes very little difference.

Alfred Krupp was a less complicated person than Nobel. In 1866 he insisted, against the wishes of Bismarck, on exporting guns to Austria, which were very soon in use against Prussia in the Austro- Prussian War. Shortly afterwards, despite having just raised a loan from the King of Prussia. Krupp tried to export his guns to France and failed only because the complacency of the French generals stood in his way. At the turn of the century Sir Basil Zaharoff, in his role as master salesman for Vickers, had considerable success travelling between opposing Balkan states — Greece and Turkey — to escalate orders from both sides. In the First World War the Maxim gun, sold by Sir Hiram Maxim to Germans, Austrians and Italians, was the prototype for the guns which fired from all sides on the Western Front. In Russia, Krupp guns fired on German soldiers and the Belgian army had been stocked from the same source. At sea both sides fired shells with Krupp fuses, and after hostilities ceased Krupp’s successfully sued Vickers for payment of royalties on its shells.

All this nefarious traffic inevitably spawned pressure for control on arms sales and for nationalisation of the industry. Even staunch capitalist defenders of “free enterprise” did not wish to see organisations from within their own territory supplying arms to a potential enemy. Whatever the views of the individuals involved, the development of capitalism led inevitably to attempts by the state machine to interfere with the freedom of the private arms manufacturers to sell to whomsoever their immediate interests dictated. The League of Nations, as ineffective before World War One as the United Nations has been since 1945, passed resolutions such as that of December 1933: “That it is contrary to the public interest that the manufacture and sale of armaments should be for private profit”.

The United States Congress, following the report of the Nye Committee of investigation into the arms business, passed in August 1935 a Neutrality Bill which compelled the President, in the event of war between foreign countries, to apply an arms embargo. The hearings of the Nye Committee were freely quoted by the British Labour Party in support of its demands for nationalisation, yet the ineffectiveness of control “remedies” had already been revealed during the Manchurian crisis of 1931. In that year Japan invaded Manchuria, then part of China, in the face of condemnation from Britain and the League of Nations and a boom in British arms exports to both sides ensued. For a couple of weeks the British government imposed an arms embargo. Duff Cooper, then Financial Secretary to the War Office, described the situation thus: "In a fortnight we took off the embargo, but during those weeks we lost a great many orders. China and Japan did not get less munitions, but men in this country got less work, less food, less employment". Thus Duff Cooper, like Alfred Nobel, used an argument more common today than in his own time. The concern of the capitalist over loss of profit is. with varying degrees of hypocrisy and cynicism, masked as sympathy for the workers thrown onto the streets as a result of unemployment. More recently the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East turmoil in general have provided further examples of duplicity. French pressure in 1969 forced Dassault, previously a generous supplier of Israel, to sell Mirage jets to Libya. Significantly the main reason was the need to ensure continuing supplies of oil.

Why does this destructive absurdity continue? The answer lies in the nature of the capitalist system itself. Unsold stocks of any commodity are a dangerous embarrassment to the owners of the means of wealth production. If the value embodied in these goods cannot be converted into cash, profits are lost and, in some cases, bankruptcy results. In the last resort this desperate pressure to sell in the face of cut-throat competition from rivals drives capitalist governments into war. This pressure of course applies in the final analysis as much to government controlled industries.

Under capitalism alliances between stales are often of a transitory nature. Japan was an ally of Britain and America in 1914-18, but fought against them in 1941-45. And despite the long-standing Falklands dispute, Argentina was not regarded as an enemy until the time of the invasion. Despite recent technological advances in the means of destruction, some comparatively old weapons are still effective, particularly in small scale wars. The Canberra bomber, the design of which started as early as 1945, helped India "liberate” Bangladesh in "Mrs. Gandhi’s War” in 1971. This aeroplane and the Lightning (1960) are much in evidence in South American air forces and are indeed not yet completely phased out of the RAF. The variability of capitalist alliances and the long life of some weapons obviously increase the danger of supplying a potential enemy with the means to hit you hard. Weapons bought with one purpose in mind can easily be put to another use. The guns from Sterling Armaments which turned up seven years later at Goose Green may well have been purchased for domestic rather than "anti-colonial” use. Campbell reports that "five were fitted with silencers, which reduce the performance of the bullets too much for conventional military use”. Probably they were intended for use against workers at home rather than abroad.

There is however yet another reason why, even with government control of arms production, sales opportunities abroad cannot be lightly spurned, even if embarrassment is risked in the process. The capitalist class has the problem of how to maintain in peacetime the capacity to produce armaments in an emergency. To convert too many factories to other products such as kidney machines would clearly put this capability at risk. In February 1935, Bernard Baruch, adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, spelled out his government’s policy with brutal frankness:

The only expedient yet used is for the governments of industrial countries at least not to discourage (and I fear almost universally to encourage) the manufacture of lethal weapons for exportation to belligerent countries actively preparing for war. but which have an insufficient munitions industry or none at all. Without specific evidence 1 still conjecture that the Nye investigation will disclose that our Government has not operated on a different policy. To put it bluntly, this is a method of providing a laboratory to test killing implements and a nucleus for a wartime munitions industry by maintaining an export market for instruments of death. Of course, it is absolutely indefensible and we could not be put in a position of excusing it.

This really says it all.

E. C. Edge

Voice From The Back: Masters of deception (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Masters of deception

We are led to believe, by the media, that the men and women who make up the government are motivated by the highest moral standards of honesty and decency. So what are we to make of Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat who wrote the following essay published by The Foreign Policy Centre and reported in the Observer (7 April)? “The postmodern world has to start to get used to double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But, when dealing with old-fashioned states outside the postmodern world continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself.”

State of the nation?

It is said that clear thinking leads to clear speaking. That clarity of thought is reflected in lucid communication. If that is so, what must the US President’s thought process be like? Here he is reported by Newsweek (22 April) as he tries to communicate something or other. Your guess is as good as ours as to what he is on about: “And so, in my State of the – my State of the Union – or state – my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation – I asked Americans to give 4,000 years – 4,000 hours over the next – the rest of your life – of service to America.” Eh?.

Arms and hypocrisy

The journalist Alex Bell recently gave an update on the British arms trade in the Herald (6 May): “One of those statistics that lodges in the mind and rarely gets revised is the one about Britain being the third largest exporter of arms in the world. Time to update it, as we’re the second largest. In the last twenty years our arms industry has grown by a factor of 10. According to the Institute for Strategic Studies, revenues from the arms trade were more than $5 billion in 2000, or twice as much as France and Germany combined. They were around $500m in the mid-1970s . . . Don’t forget that just as Tony Blair was trying to calm the border dispute in January between Pakistan and India, he was in Delhi trying to flog jets.” So what happened to that much vaunted “ethical foreign policy”?

The childhood destroyer

Capitalism has only one drive – make profits. In that ruthless drive the planet is poisoned by pollution, the rivers and lakes are turned into sewers and human life is stunted, broken and destroyed. Perhaps the greatest indictment of this Frankenstein society is the way it treats the old, the disabled and the most vulnerable group of all the world’s children: “One child in eight has to do work that could harm them physically or mentally, the UN labour agency claimed. Some 246 million children are in unacceptable forms of child labour, with 179 million in hazardous mining, fishing and construction, says the ILO, but 8.4 million children are caught up in slavery, trafficking, forced recruitment for battle, prostitution, and pornography.” Herald (7 May)

Tory braveheart

The Scottish Parliament over the years has illustrated that it can be just as silly as Westminster when dealing with social problems. In a country that has all the usual features of capitalism – poverty, drug addiction and homelessness all this backwoodsman Tory could proffer to the parliament’s deliberations was the following piece of nonsense: “A Tory MSP has lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament, calling for William Wallace to be officially recognised as a “patriot” before the 700th anniversary of his death in August 1305. Phil Gallie, the Tory constitutional affairs spokesman, said the anniversary of Wallace’s death was an opportunity to ‘right wrong’.” Times (9 May)

God and mammon

According to a recent Church of Scotland report they are losing 17,000 punters a year and, unless this trend is dealt with, they could cease to exist by 2050. So concerned are they about the potential drop in income that the Moderator commissioned a journalist to produce a book entitled Outside Verdict; An Old Kirk in a New Scotland. The author proposes tithing members’ salaries and flogging off manses and overseas churches:. The book states: “There are too many people in the kirk who refuse to think of it as a business, who think that because this money is being used for God’s work, contemporary business practice need not apply.” Sunday Times (12 May). But isn’t it also the business of the Church to tell gullible workers on a Sunday morning not to thirst after the material things of this world, to be content with their lot and look for their reward in the next world?

Masters of War (2010)

From the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘You can fool all of the people some of the time … and some of the people all of the time … but …

The US occupation forces in Afghanistan have learned a particular lesson from the disaster that is Iraq, and they have learned it big time. In the first, largely contracted out war in history, US and other foreign civilians were brought in to carry out just about every task, from the mundane to those viewed as ‘front-line’. A direct consequence of this strategy was millions of unemployed and very disgruntled Iraqis, a large percentage of whom became active or passive supporters of the forces of insurgency/resistance against the perceived injustices of the occupation. In the corporate boardrooms of US War Machine Inc. the alarm bells were ringing; costs (dead bodies and bodies with bits missing) were eating into public opinion and support for the corporations’ products (perpetual war and war materials/services) was declining and, potentially, could severely impact their bottom lines. A slight shift in strategy was called for.

Afghanistan, in recent times, has never really been a nation state; it is an area of the world that is a patch-work of tribal fiefdoms that shift in and out of local alliances at the whim of chieftains or as balances of power dictate. In order for US and NATO forces to function, in what they like to call the ‘Battlespace’, they have to factor these tribal leaders and their shifting alliances into their planning. The logistics for any invader/occupier of this land are daunting in the extreme. It is a wild, unforgiving place peopled by proud, largely unconquered tribes with very long memories who do not take kindly to uninvited foreigners trying to lord it over them. Ameliorating some of that hostility would enable more focus on the ‘flagged-up’ enemy, al-Qa’ida and their Taliban associates.

As the conflict dragged on and soon to be president of US War Machine Inc. Senator Obama announced that, in his opinion, it was a ‘war of necessity’, the strategic planners came up with an ingenious ploy that would give gainful employment to Afghans, put money into their pockets and just might persuade them to view the occupiers of their lands in a sufficiently different light that they would stop shooting at or blowing up corporate assets and personnel. The name of this new strategy – ‘Host Nation Trucking’, and it works something like this . .

Take a gaggle of well connected, powerful and non-too-scrupulous ‘business men’ and award them six trucking contracts currently worth $2.2 billion. People like the Popal brothers, owners of the huge Watan Group, both convicted whilst in the US of dealing in heroin and cousins of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Or Hamed Wardek, owner of NCL Holdings and son of current Afghan defence minister, General Abdul Wardek. NCL includes such luminaries as ‘legendary former CIA case officer and clear-headed thinker and writer’ (says Senator John Kerry, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, October 2009) Milton Beardon on its advisory board. Or Asia Security Group, owned by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. (Aram Roston, ‘How the US Funds the Taliban’, The Nation, 30 November) These companies already have a well oiled model for doing business along the ancient trading routes and in the minefield that is present day Afghanistan – each has an armed ‘private security division’ and field agents who buy-off attacks by fractious warlords along any route. In this way US and NATO troops should get everything from ammunition to toilet paper supplied to even the their furthest-flung outposts with fewer inconvenient disruptions.

That was the theory behind the plan and in reality it mostly works pretty well. The US Defense Dept. throws huge quantities of dollars to the contractors, who in turn buy off the warlords who control those routes that pass through their territories. Many of these warlords are associated with the Taliban or are the local Taliban commanders, so extensive funding finds its way into Taliban coffers. Even the Taliban, who are the supreme warlords in control of the south of the country, are not immune from getting in on the action directly. Pay the premiums for their ‘insurance’ and it is sufficient for just two of their escorting ‘technicals’ to ensure the safe passage of any convoy through any stretch of hostile territory, which in reality is everywhere. Fail to pay up and the consequences are guaranteed to be devastating and deadly. Drivers can be picked off by snipers and rocket propelled grenades will blow the vehicles to pieces. One US owned firm, Four Horsemen International, has so far refused to pay and has tried to take on the Taliban with its own security teams; their convoys are attacked on almost every mission and the price in lives has been high. At some stage, no doubt, they will have to follow other security firms and do what they must in order to survive. An indication of premium rates can be gleaned from the following: per truck, per section of territory under a particular warlord = approx. $800, although it depends on what is being carried. Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar is about 300 kms, the local warlord, Commander Ruhullah, levies around $1,500 per truck and for military supplies this is the only route to the south, to Helmand and the Taliban heartland. The NCL company alone is billed $500,000 per month for ‘services’ rendered en-route through Ruhullah’s turf, an indication of the scale of business.

Throwing money at a problem to make it go away has been elevated to the level of a doctrine within the US military, which goes under the title of ‘Money as a Weapons System’. To give some perspective, the $2.2 billion, two-year effort to hire Afghani trucks and truckers represents around 10 percent of that country’s GDP and although firm figures are hard to come by it is estimated that between 10-20 percent is finding its way to the Taliban. The regime in Kabul has recently increased the wages of its police and army by $45 to around $125 per month, far less than the Taliban pays its fighters, so why work for that lot when the ‘firm’ down the road is offering a better deal? No surprise then that the effective strength of these two organisations is around half of the claimed 90,000 for the police and 95,000 for the army, or that the power and influence of the Taliban continues to grow. They have their very own milch cow with a seeming never-ending stream of greenbacks. US spin would have us believe that it is drugs money that funds the Taliban in direct opposition to their actions when in power. Under Taliban rule poppy/opium production was almost eliminated; by contrast, since the US invasion and the re-establishment of the warlords, production is at an historic high. None the less, this is the lie fed to the US public rather than revealing the truth which could well swing public opinion so strongly as to imperil the very profitable merry-go-round that is the conflict in Afghanistan. Better to keep the mushrooms in the dark than let them see the light of truth!

Step back for a moment and look at it this way; the US military, possibly the world’s ultimate ‘service provider’, is a gigantic consumer of goods and services. Its top people are highly paid executives who are guaranteed lucrative positions in supplying corporations when the time comes to move on. Working with their associates in government they benefit from continuing conflicts/wars that use up existing stockpiles/services which then need re-stocking from their appreciative suppliers. Prolonging the production run of any particular product or model is a well-proven policy for squeezing the last drop of profit from any venture. So it follows that in the context of modern, contracted-out warfare any strategy that strings out a conflict will mean more profits in the pockets of those corporations, organisations and their stock-holders who agree to play it by the rules of the capitalist system, and that includes Messrs. Taliban Associates Inc. In this lethal capitalist game, it is mostly the workers, the cannon-fodder on each side of any conflict who pay the supreme price; the elite, whether they wear the pin-stripped suits of corporate boardrooms or the black turbans of a Taliban leader, largely escape the extreme consequences of these policies.

The average US citizen thinks that it is ‘their’ money that’s paying for ‘their’ military to fight a war in Afghanistan that will protect ‘their’ homeland from another 9/11 or some crazed mullah with a suicide atomic bomb under his jacket. Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. The media has convinced them that it is a price worth paying, and anyway, aren’t there tens of thousands of good US households that, directly or indirectly, depend on defence company salaries to pay the mortgage? If they ever wake up to the fact that it is also ‘their’ money that is paying for the munitions that kill their sons and daughters and is providing the Taliban with much of what it needs to carry on its campaign indefinitely, to the benefit and enrichment of all the stakeholders in the business of war and conflict, might they not get very angry? Might they not rise up against the Masters of War and their corrupt system? Don’t hold your breath!

‘You can fool some of the people . . .’ Was this saying concocted by some US president or other to convince his people that they are really too smart to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a system devised to enrich the few whilst keeping the majority in bondage? How else to explain the predatory economic ways of the world and the widespread apathy towards them in the so-called ‘world’s only superpower’ and its war-mongering allies?

'… you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’

Oh, yeah!

Alan Fenn

Notes by the Way: More Profit-sharing and Why (1955)

The Notes by the Way Column from the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

More Profit-sharing and Why

The Conservative Government has given its blessing to profit sharing and we may expect to see more of it. But, surprisingly, one firm that for years has had such a scheme has now announced its termination. This is the Triplex Safety Glass Company. The head of the firm, Sir Graham Cunningham, has told the thousand hourly paid workers that the share in profits now to be paid will be the last, though the salaried staff will continue in the scheme. The reason for the ending of profit-sharing for the others is that the workers have gone on pressing for higher wages and they are now told they can have one or the other but not both.

"Successful Union pressure for higher wages has caused the management to cut out all shares in profits.”—(News Chronicle, 15/10/55.)

Sir Graham Cunningham is quoted as saying:—

“I am a blunt fellow. I told them they cannot have their bun and eat it”

He added, according to the News Chronicle, “that profit sharing could be restored to the men paid by the hour if they accepted a wage cut.”

The Liberal News Chronicle, which supports profit sharing, thinks that Cunningham has been too blunt:— 

“This is not so much being blunt as topsy-turvy. The whole principle of profit sharing is to provide incentive and loyalty, so that management and labour work with and not against each other. It means something extra in the good years, but with a reasonable wage as the background.” 

Another interesting comment on profit-sharing has been made by Mr. J. Spedan Lewis, founder and chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, on the occasion of his retirement. According to the Daily Telegraph (23/9/55), Mr, Lewis

“said last night that some profit-sharing schemes seemed to be in the nature of offering ransom. The people who ran them appeared to be offering to give up part of what they had been keeping for the sake of increasing their chance of retaining the rest.”

The Lewis firm has just had a spot of bother because some of the workers have objected to the firm opening letters to the staff marked "private” or “personal"; but a majority voted down a resolution of protest (Daily Express, 29/55).

The Labour Party and Cyprus

The Tory Government has declared that they do not accept for universal application the principle of “self-determination” and intend to hold on to Cyprus for strategic purposes in spite of the evident wish of the majority of the population to join Greece.

The Labour Party, now in opposition, condemns this and declares its support for “self-determination” in Cyprus.

It was not always so. When the Labour Party were in office and the Tories were in opposition, the Labour Government took up the same attitude as that now taken by the Tories. It was in 1950 that the Labour Government, through a letter to the Archbishop of Cyprus, declared that despite a plebiscite showing the Greek speaking Cypriots in favour of joining Greece

“The British Government regarded the question of Enosis (union with Greece) as closed (The Times, 24/2/50). 

Molotov Confesses

Molotov, Russia’s Foreign Minister since Litvinoff was removed when the Stalin-Hitler Pact of Friendship was being fixed up in 1939, has been made to eat humble pie in a letter published in the Russian journal Kommunist. He had made the statement that in Russia “the foundations of Socialism have already been built.” But this implied that Socialism bad not yet been completely established. He has now had to confess that this was wrong and that this “does not correspond to reality and contradicts the numerous estimates of the result of the construction of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. given in Party documents.” (Manchester Guardian, 10/1 /55.).

Thus the year-long word trickery of the Russian Communist Party goes a stage further. Their official version is that Communism does not exist in Russia but that Socialism has already been achieved. They conveniently forget their earlier publications in which, like Marx, they used the word Socialism and Communism as alternative names for the same thing. Lenin, who at that time was less mealy-mouthed gave the real name that covers the Russia system, State Capitalism.

The Myth of Planning

One of the clever-silly notions of the reformists ever since they started trying to reform Capitalism has been that someone could plan its production and distribution. Sometimes, as at the end of last century, many of the reformists thought that the Capitalists, through trusts and cartels, would do the job. Others have thought that Labour Governments would do it and so did the Labour Governments until they tried. The 1929 Labour Government planned a “boom” and reaped a “bust”; in the years 1945-1951, their annual plans never came out right, as the yearly “Economic Surveys” showed; and the planned production and profit and price reductions of the nationalised industries were farcical. And either the Labour Government planned the big rise of the cost of living that accompanied their administration (with wage rates lagging behind) or else they have to admit that their plan for a steady or falling cost of living was a failure.

The Tories have fared no better. In April the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Treasury, helped by their expert financial and economic advisers, planned the Budget for a year. But by October he had to produce a new Budget. Things had gone so badly adrift from the plan that Mr. Butler could not even wait till next April to have another go.

Our Ancient Scholastic Establishments

According to Dr. Kathleen Ollerenshaw, a co-opted member of the Manchester Education Committee, who has collected information about school buildings from all the chief education officers in England and Wales, about half the children attend schools that were built over half a century ago, before 1903. The number in schools built since 1944 is about 750,000, but another 750,000 are in schools built before the Education Act of 1870. The number in schools built between 1870 and 1903 is about 2,000,000.

The report appeared in “Education,” organ of the Association of Education Committees and the details given above were published in the Manchester Guardian (23/9/55).

The International Wheat Plan

Of recent years the emphasis of the planners has been on international action, often through United Nations and its Agencies.

One of the fields in which there has been long experience is the attempt to regulate the production and sale of wheat in the world. It was the enormous accumulation of unsaleable wheat that was one of 'the outstanding features of the crisis of the nineteen thirties, and Governments and economists have gone in fear of a repetition ever since. The idea of the original planners for an international wheat agreement was to cut out the extremely violent ups and downs of prices and make the movement of prices more even without eliminating them altogether. It was supposed that production would still rise in response to a moderate rise of price and would fall when prices fell. A writer in the Manchester Guardian (23/9/55) in the second of two articles on the international wheat conference and the possibility of a new agreement being reached, points out that in practice this has not happened. He quotes a secretary of the pre-war International Wheat Council, Mr. Andrew Cairns, as follows:—

“An increase in wheat prices generally produces an increase in wheat acreage, but a decrease . . . . generally produces an increase in direct or indirect Government assistance to wheat growers.” 

This is what has been happening since the end of the war and there is no chance whatever of a solution being found except that a series of bad harvests might temporarily relieve the pressure.

The result is that there is again far too much wheat for the markets to absorb.

“In the four main exporting countries—the United States, Canada, Argentina and Australia—production remained high and exports fell further; as a result supplies available for export and carry-over on April 1st, 1953, rose sharply by nearly 400 million bushels to a new high record of 2,090 million. A year later the carry-over was higher still at 2,155 million bushels, and it rose again to 2,374 million bushels on August 1st this year, despite poor crops in certain countries last season.”—(Economist, 1st October, 1955.)

And what are the planners supposed to do for those who employ them, the Governments? Plan to grow more wheat and give it away? Or cut the acreage by force, take away farmers' subsidies and lose votes for the Government candidates in rural areas?

Capitalism is not just a system of production but a class system of society. No Capitalist industry is, or can be, interested in feeding hungry mouths unless there are full purses attached thereto. No Government does, or can, think merely in terms of producing what food they need, or of buying it elsewhere where it is being produced. Each Government has to think politically of farmers' votes, and militarily in terms of having food produced at home in case of war. The efforts of the Governments and the wheat growers therefore end up by producing one of Capitalism's characteristic contradictions—too little wheat for the world’s stomach, but too much wheat for the digestion of the Capitalist market.

The Merchants of Death, British aid Russian

Like belligerent stay-at-home politicians and parsons who send others out to be killed, the manufacturers of armaments have always been held in popular disrepute. The Labour Party, I.L.P. and Communists, for years made the “merchants of death" the target for their attacks as part of their muddled propaganda based on the idea that you can prevent war by nationalising the armament trade.

Behind it was the odd notion that while private Capitalists sell armaments, where they can, Governments do not. As recently as 29 July of this year Tribune, the Bevanite journal, had the following under the heading “Plain Stupid":—

“Shells bombard British ships in the Suez Canal. Who fires them? Egyptian destroyers. And who gave Egypt the destroyers? Britain.

"This is one of the brilliant achievements of the Tory Government. As a contribution to reducing tension in the Middle East we are busy selling arms to both sides. Thus Egypt is given the privilege of buying two destroyers from us. And so is Israel.

“Likewise with war planes. Equal numbers are sold to each Arab state and to Israel.

“Here the system of fair shares breaks down. There is only one Israel. There are several Arab states. Thus we tip the balance against a new, progressive nation, in favour of highly aggressive, largely reactionary rulers.

“Does Tribune want more arms for Israel ? Not at all. We are proposing no arms for either side. Simply that Britain should seek to apply the principles stated at Geneva instead of apparently doing her best to make war in the Middle East inevitable.

Since that was written the news that Russia and her satellites are supplying arms to Egypt and other Middle East Governments has knocked sideways Tribune’s belief in the Geneva spirit.

We may also recall that when Mr. Bevan was in the Labour Government in 1950 that Government, too, was selling arms to Egypt and many other countries (including Czechoslovakia, which is now selling arms to Egypt). The 1950 deals were disclosed by Mr. Attlee in the House of Commons on 16 March, 1950, and were justified by him on the ground of “the need for exports," in other words selling instruments of death for profit.

Now we have the Czechoslovak Government putting forward exactly the same kind of justification; it is just “trade.”

The Daily Worker (3/10/55) reports as follows:—

“Referring to the arms deal, Prague Radio said: “The Egyptian Government, in the interests of security and peace in the region, has turned to where deliveries of arms can be obtained on a purely commercial basis, without political or other conditions'.”

This recalls a letter written to the Manchester Guardian, on 21 January, 1941, by the Communist Albert Inkpin, who at that time was secretary of the Russia Today Society. This was before Germany attacked Russia, in the period when the Pact of Friendship between the two Governments was still in being. Germany and Britain had been at war for nearly 18 months and some M.P.s had commented on the supplies of materials useful for war flowing into Germany from Russia. To this Mr. Inkpin replied by assuring the readers of the Manchester Guardian that while Russia was supplying “oil products, raw materials and grain” to Germany, they were quite willing to export them to Britain as well.

It is, of course, good Capitalist principle to sell to both sides in a war, but if the Russian Government had been concerned to stop the war they could have refitted to supply either side.

There are plenty of precedents for this. History recalls the British manufacturers who supplied uniforms to Napoleon's armies.

The Crimean War over again ?

Just over a century ago there was war between England and her Allies, and Russia nominally over the Holy Places in Jerusalem, but actually over the effort of Russia to break into the Mediterranean and British Capitalists desire to stop it

Now we have Russia and Czechoslovakia selling arms in the Middle East, the British Government protesting against this threat to the balance of power, and newspaper editors working up a scare about a new Russian drive to the Mediterranean and Africa—the Crimean war episode again.

Here is the reaction of the Daily Express (19/10/55):-

“Cold War Again?

“Three months after the Geneva conference a new diplomatic war is developing, this time in the Middle East. The Russians are going all out to extend their influence there.

“First, there was the Egyptian-Czech arms deal. Now the Russians establish diplomatic relations with the Yemen, a country which lays claim to Britain’s Colony of Aden.

“They are also negotiating a new trade deal with Syria. They are offering Egypt £89,000,000 or more to build a dam on the Nile.

“The Reason Why

“All these moves are aimed at undermining the West’s defence plans in this area. How come the Russians are able to bring them off ?

“It all stems from Britain’s scuttle from Suez. If this country were still securely in the Canal Zone the Russians could never hope to establish themselves in the Middle East.

“But Britain's departure creates vacuum and weakness which Russia is now able to exploit. So the folly of scuttle is exposed. Let Britain resolve that this policy shall never, never be repeated.”

Edgar Hardcastle

Voice From The Back: Stay At Your Desk, Slave (2008)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stay At Your Desk, Slave

Now and then a wonderful product comes along that the owning class just love. This may be one of them. “The maker of a new product that combines a treadmill and computer workstation is banking on the notion that companies will invest in products like the “Walkstation” as a way of keeping health care costs down and improving overall fitness levels. The device allows people to work on their computers while walking on a treadmill at a slow speed of up to three kilometers (two miles) per hour, enabling small amounts of movement that supporters say have the potential to reap big health benefits.” (Yahoo News, 13 July) Now all we need is a “Feedstation” that shovels food into your mouth while you work. Oh, Charlie Chaplin already envisaged that in Modern Times didn’t he? How about the “Bedpanstation”? Too much perhaps?

What's ethics got to do with it?

“European and US defence companies will this week kick off talks on a joint code of ethics to cover arms sales. Representatives from the industry’s leading trade bodies will meet at the Farnborough Air Show  in the UK on Tuesday. European companies have recently developed an anti-corruption code in a bid to improve the industry’s reputation, which has suffered in the wake of allegations of bribery and corruption in connection with some of its biggest players.” (Financial Times, 13 July) As these guardians of morality meet to discuss whether it is more ethical to kill a child with poisonous gas, napalm bombs or good old fashioned high explosives we ask ourselves what do sellers of death know of ethics. They are money grubbing killers. 

Chinese Workers Wake Up

“Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.” (Yahoo News, 15 July) We should echo the sentiments of an old song, probably banned in China now. They occur in The Red Flag – “Arise like starvelings from your slumber” Let’s hope so!

Health And Hypocrisy

The following announcement caused a storm of controversy in the media. “Patients cannot rely on the NHS to save their lives if the cost of doing so is too great, the Government’s medicines watchdog has ruled for the first time. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) has said the natural impulse to go to the aid of individuals in trouble – as when vast resources are used to save a sailor lost at sea – should not apply to the NHS. The disclosure follows last week’s controversial decision by Nice to reject four new drugs for kidney cancer even though they have been shown to extend life by five to six months.” (Independent, 13 August) To socialists the announcement is far from shocking. That is how capitalism operates – if you are rich you have access to the best food, clothing, shelter, education and recreation. Why should it be so shocking to learn that if you are poor you cannot afford the best of medicine either.

The Perfect Worker

“A Ugandan official has suggested to MPs that funerals should be limited to Saturday afternoons to stop people taking time off work to attend them. Speciosa Kazibwe, a former vice-president who now heads a state development agency, noted that Uganda’s death rate was very high. (BBC News, 25 July) Socialists used to say that the capitalist’s idea of the perfect worker was one who left school at 15, worked 50 weeks a year for 50 years and dropped down dead the first day he went to collect his pension at the post office. We will have to amend this ideal blueprint in view of the Ugandan official’s view. Ideally he would die on the Thursday so that his family could attend his Saturday funeral without missing out on a day producing surplus value for the owning class.

The Arms Industry: From Bazil Zaharoff to Ray Brown (1966)

From the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The affairs of arms manufacturers and their agents have for many years been a fertile field of investigation for social reformers who look for the cause of human suffering and social chaos in the activities of evil men. The recent appointment of Ray Brown to the new government post of Head of Defence Sales, for example, let off a storm of protests by government back-benchers. An old bogey was raised in a question by Labour M.P. John Rankin: —

Is my Right Honourable Friend aware that the appointment of Mr. Brown seems to be similar to a former appointment, that of Sir Bazil Zaharoff, who earned a reputation in this country and in the Labour movement for his nefarious practices which were widely condemned by every member of the Labour movement?

A brief study of the development of the arms industry over the last hundred years will show the points of similarity.

The second half of the 19th century was a period of rapid technical advance in armaments. The industrial revolution produced the coal, iron and steel, chemical and mechanical engineering industries which were to make this possible. The Industrial Revolution was itself part of the development of a society where antagonisms made arms production a necessity.

For about 300 years naval warfare had changed little. It was fought in wooden sailing ships carrying bronze cannons with the winds and human energy as their only sources of power. Between the Crimean War and the end of the century great changes took place. Steam powered, armour-plated ships built with rifled steel guns capable of hurling shells of three-quarters of a ton many miles with great accuracy. Armoured plate became thicker and tougher as the guns became more powerful. At the end of the century the torpedo shattered the supremacy of the battleship. On land similar advances were made by artillery. In small arms the machine gun, developing from hand operated models to the Maxim automatic, gave the infantry far greater firepower. The railways also made it possible to deploy men and war materials rapidly.

The great technical development of the advanced countries and the consequent rapid increase in production provided not only the wealth, but also the source of frictions which were to make increased arms expenditure necessary. One result was the intensified rivalry in the search for markets for the increasing volume of commodities. There were many chances for the weapons to be proved in battle; the American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and so on until the First World War.

The great arms manufacturers were drawn into the industry by the prospects of greater profits. The steel and heavy engineering industries were in the second half of the 19th century plagued by fluctuations in the demand for their goods. Expansion during boom time and prospects of bankruptcy during slumps made it urgent that their activities be diversified. The British government, in order to have the latest technical developments incorporated in the weapons of its armed forces, placed orders for components such as gun barrels with the Sheffield steel makers and later for the complete guns. It was in this way that pickers came into the industry. Their activities grew as they took over a shipyard at Barrow and the Maxim Machine Gun Company. By 1914, Vickers had grown to an international combine, whose products ranged from complete battleships to machine guns. Armstrongs, a general engineering firm in north-east England, also became a giant of the arms industry. Krupp in Germany and Schneider in France were their main rivals.

Like any other commodity, armaments were—and are—made to be sold profitably. Governments were usually the customers and the industry's sales methods were tailored to suit the markets. The major manufacturers had well staffed branch offices in the capital cities that offered the best prospects of sales. These offices were private diplomatic missions in close contact with the government; some were reputed to have greater knowledge of local politics than the official embassies. Where local conditions demanded it, bribery and corruption were used.

Zaharoff, whose early life was spent in the Balkans, started his career in the arms industry as the Balkans agent for the Anglo-Swedish firm of Nordenfeld. Among their products was the first commercial submarine. His first success was the sale of one of these to the Greek Navy in 1877 followed by an order for two from the Turkish Navy. This was the start of Zaharoff’s reputation for playing one nation against the other; for exploiting a rivalry which already existed. Zaharoff was well equipped for his job; he was fluent in several languages, a great charmer, had a wide knowledge of the world and politics, all of which he applied with great success to his job. He quickly became Nordenfeld's agent for the whole of Europe.

In this new capacity Zaharoff was up against Maxim’s, whose machine gun was far superior to Nordcnfeld's. Zaharoff tried every dirty trick in the trade to win orders for his firm but they were of no avail against the superior product. The result of the clash was the merger of the two firms with Zaharoff looking after the sales and Maxim's the technical details. Later in the 1890’s, Vickers took them over and it was with Vickers that Zaharoff reached the height of his career. His activities look him all over the world, negotiating orders wherever the demand occured.

Vickers at this lime obtained large shares in a number of overseas arms companies including some in Spain. Italy and Japan, as well as contracts to manage the government dockyards of Russia and Turkey. Other international activities included membership of a syndicate of British, French, German and American firms to divide territories and profits and to pool patents for armoured plate; licensing a German firm, Deutsche Wallen, to manufacture and sell machine guns with shared profits in certain markets; an agreement whereby Vickers made and sold Krupps time and percussion fuses. There were also gentlemen’s agreements with Armstrong to avoid clashing in foreign markets.

It is probable that Zaharoff had a hand in negotiating many of these agreements, which were, after all, normal business arrangements. He was also credited with controlling sections of the foreign press and of getting into the confidence of the world’s leading politicians. His tactics included philanthropy; grants to set up aviation studies at one university, financing literary prizes and establishing homes for disabled sailors. It was rumoured that he was one of the richest men in the world and had control of the world's armament industry. When he died in 1936, he left only £1 million which is far from making him one of the richest men but very good for a salesman.

The First World War caused the expansion of the arms industry so that a large part of world industry was geared to supplying the combatants. The war provided the incentive to develop Switzerland’s aluminium and hydro-electricity generating industries: Japanese industry prospered greatly and expanded. The opposing forces faced each other with international armaments. 'The world's navies were clad with Krupp’s patented armour plate. The armies used machine guns operating on principles developed by Maxim. The torpedoes were Whitehead’s design.

Once the war was over the accounts had to be settled. Krupp’s and Vickers were in dispute over royalties on fuses and Vickers and Deutsche Wallen were in dispute over royalties on machine guns. Business, in other words, as usual.

The ending of the war produced the very situation—the slump—which the arms makers had tried to safeguard by joining the industry. Their activities had expanded continuously for many years during the pre-war arms race and during the war had expanded much more again. In Britain, there was a boom in engineering and ship-building for two or three years after 1918, then the slump came with production and prices dropping drastically. Both Vickers and Armstrong had tried to diversify their activities into a wide variety of products from locomotives to sewing machines, but to no avail. By 1925 they were both in great difficulties and outside experts were called in to advise. The two firms were merged and Vickers-Armstrong struggled on for many years before another arms race restored their profits.

In the slump, these two mighty firms were powerless. Their best salesmen could not revive the market. Their close contacts with the great politicians and military leaders of the world could not help them. In fact, capitalism mastered them and not the other way round.

Various efforts were made by the League of Nations to regulate the arms industry but with little success. Many hooks were published during this period exposing the arms industry. They were useful in showing the workings of the industry but their solutions limited to such useless measures as nationalisation and international commissions to control sales. Disarmament conferences were piecemeal affairs, trying to limit the number of battleships and cruisers, weapons which were on the way out.

The arms race before World War Two was concerned with aircraft, tanks, armoured cars and submarines. The industry became more subject to government control. Instead of setting the pace with design and innovations, it became more and more dependent on working to government specifications.

The Second World War saw the introduction of some of the war material with which we are familiar today—electronics in radar and rocket guidance, rockets and the atom-bomb.

The atom-bomb could only be developed by governments; it required far greater resources than any private firm could muster. The IJSA was the first to produce it, over a million men being involved in this project. In spite of the greatest secrecy about its production, there are now five countries openly making this weapon. The main rivalry since the Second World War has been between the USA and Russia. There has been a continuous high level of spending on arms, including a race in the production of nuclear weapons and the aircrafts and rockets to deliver them. This rivalry is now carried on into space.

The expense of this development can only be borne by the giant nations such as the USA and Russia. The former great nations are now left well behind.

Since the war the international arms trade has continued. The Nato and Warsaw Pact alliances provide large markets, as do the new independent countries many of which spend over 30 per cent of their budgets on so called defence. For all the government control, the internationalisation of the industry is still there. The British Hawker Hunter and Canberra aircraft and the American F104 have been built in many countries. The Russian MIG fighter is built not only in Warsaw pact countries but also in India.

The arms trade has continued to flourish but the British capitalists’ share of it has declined steadily. Russia and America now oiler a far more attractive range of goods and are also better organised to take advantage of the market. Russia’s triumphs include breaking into the Egyptian, Cuban. Indonesian and Indian markets. Private enterprise USA is also showing the way by having a government sales organisation with Henry J. Kuss in charge under the title of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Logistics Negotiations. Kuss is a career Civil Servant and The Observer (15.5.66) reported, “Last year he was given a medal by McNamara for selling 9,000 million dollars worth of arms since his appointment in I960.” He also forecasts a booming market. “Mr. Kuss was recently quoted as saying that over the next ten years about 100,000 million dollars would be spent in the free world outside the United States on military hardware." (Financial Times, 22.12.65).

This brings us back to Mr. Ray Brown and his job of expanding Britain’s arms sales. Despite such promising markets, only £125 millions of British arms are being exported each year. The Labour Government are hoping that an increase in exports will help to solve their balance of payments problem. At present, Mr. Brown must he a little confused with his job. as there are certain promising markets out of bounds: South Africa and Spain, for instance. The conditions for sale to America must be hard to swallow: no doubt the Labour conscience would he calmed if the arms were only used for peaceful purposes like strike breaking or quelling riots.

And this brings us back to the agony of the Left. Mr. Rankin sees a similarity between the roles of Zaharoff and Brown. Of course there is: the only difference being that Zaharoff worked for Vickers and not (as Mr. Rankin thought) for the Government. The conditions of 1966 may require different selling techniques to 1906 and, as men, Zaharoff and Brown may be as different as chalk and cheese but the essential features are the sun. Weapons of war are made to be used and their effects will be the same whether gentlemen or rogues sell them or whether it be governments or private firms that employ the salesmen.

Joe Carter