“Too much” food again (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism we are faced with a seemingly insoluble contradiction. Poverty and hunger exist in the midst of potential plenty. Within the private property relationships of capitalism the existence of means for ending this problem can itself appear to be a problem.

Take for example three reports in just one edition of The Guardian, that of July 12. In it we are informed on page 3 that:

“The world’s population will double by the year 2004 at the present growth rate, yet food production has already declined on a per capita basis, the UN reported today . . . agricultural production in 1969, the latest year for which comprehensive figures were compiled by UN statisticians, was 2 per cent lower than the previous year.”

A serious problem by any standard when one considers that the majority of the world’s people are inadequately fed at present. But here comes the contradiction . . . Turning over to page 4 we see an article by John Cunningham entitled quaintly “Scientists look into eggs”. He tells us that:

“Scientists are going to work on an egg — actually thousands of eggs — to try to find new uses for a surplus which is worrying the Eggs Authority so much that it is prepared to spend £40,000 on research and development this year.

‘We are not simply looking for food uses’, Mr. Bernard Mallett, the authority’s chief executive, said yesterday. ‘Frankly, anything could hold the key. It could be an industrial use, the manufacture of plastics, decorating materials, cosmetics . . . who knows? We hope research will find some profitable outlet for eggs surplus to even the food products market.'”

However the troubles of the Egg Marketing Board are nothing compared with the problems reported on page 12, in the Business Section, to be afflicting the Common Market Commission in Brussels.

“The record grain now ripening in the fields of Europe is causing grave concern . . . The crop is currently estimated at 174 million tons — four million tons more than the highest previous total. 

If such a crop is harvested, it could revive the nightmare of big surpluses in Europe.”

And their solution? “The Commission”, said The Guardian, “can only pray for rain”.

These contradictions are an inevitable outcome of the commodity system. Under capitalism food, together with other things we need in order to live, is private property. Wealth takes the form of commodities, that is, it is produced not primarily that people might eat, but to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. If too much food is produced for the market system to deal with profitably then the owners and those who run capitalism are faced with a “problem”. But this is only a problem where the relationships of ownership exist.

In a Socialist society, where the means of life will be owned in common by the world community, food will be produced not for profit but to satisfy human need. With the removal of the artificial barrier of the profit-motive, producing sufficient food to feed all the people of the world would present very few problems. Yet today while men and women go hungry eggs are “fed to minks to improve the quality and sheen of the fur” and men in Brussels are hoping rain will destroy food : what a sad reflection on the values of a society where profit is the paramount motive for production.

Gwynn Thomas

All mad together (1962)

From the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the television screens they are smooth and assured. They smile with confident, frank eyes; if occasionally they show emotion they never lose their dignity. For these men are the politicians, who like to think that they are in control. Or they are the planners, who dream that organisation will solve everything.

The impression they like to make is that, although it is always so much better to have them in charge, Capitalism is anyway a sane and ordered set-up in which everything works pretty well. There may be one or two little problems here and there, but generally, they think, everything works out for the best. The men at the top know what they are doing, the world turns nicely on its axis and all the madmen are in the lunatic asylums. What could be better?

What, indeed? For sure, the workers go along with this. They, too, think that Capitalism is the best social organisation we have or are likely to deserve. Whatever worries or criticisms they may have about income tax or rising rents or redundancies, the workers think the world is organised as well as it can be—and whenever they get the chance they vote that way.

Now just how much sanity is there in the world? How much, for example, for the old people who long ago perhaps were themselves bemused by the puffs in favour of Capitalism? We all know that growing old can be one of the fiercest problems of our lives, meaning that we lose our jobs and sometimes our homes and our friends. For the morbidly inclined the prospect of poverty in old age can loom over his youth like a bank of storm clouds on a summer’s day. So the old ones have been a matter for the attention of many governments, for a long time. Hardly an election passes without the contesting parties all struggling to get their protective legislative arms around the pensioners. The Tories pull out figures to show that they have done better than the Labour Party on pensions. Labour cries that the Tories don’t really care for the old dears of the working class and anyway arc a lot of skinflints. Wistfully the Liberals and others wait with their promises to do better than both Labour and Tory put together.

Anybody could be excused for assuming that the pensioners had gained some material benefit from this anxiety to do so well by them. What are the facts? Early this year Codicote Press published a book on the subject—The Economic Circumstances of Old People, by Dorothy Cole and John Utting. Did the authors find the subjects of their inquiry living in prosperous ease? They did not. Were they doing alright then, contented, getting by? Wrong again. They estimated, in fact, that nearly two and a half million old people are living close to the state which the national assistance standards regard as poverty.

These standards are based on cold figures of cost of living indexes and so on, but we can guess what living on the poverty line means for a pensioner. It means a cold room in the winter. It means dining off dry bread and an Oxo cube in hot water. It means broken shoes and tattered clothes. These people live like this only because they are too old to tap out the profits for an employer. Their destitution defies the tinkering of the planners and the politicians. In terms of sanity and human welfare it is a scandal.

Young workers also get a taste of what Capitalist sanity and order means. At the end of this month the Government are expected to announce that the pay pause is at an end and that it will be succeeded by some other attempt at holding down wages, under a different snappy name. Ever since the end of the last war, when it became apparent that workers were strongly placed to press for higher pay, governments have been scheming and appealing to keep wages in check. Sometimes they have done this openly, as in Cripps’ freeze and Selwyn Lloyd’s pause. Sometimes they have done it in a roundabout way—by the 1949 devaluation of the pound, for example. So far they have not openly defied the big trade unions and forced a show down battle with them; perhaps that is in the future. But whatever method they have used, the theme has been constant—wages must be pegged down.

Yet who can be blamed for wanting more pay? Perhaps some workers believed the wartime propaganda which was intended to convince them that victory over Germany and Japan would bring, among other things, prosperity for them. Perhaps some of them think that as the post war productivity drive has succeeded to the point of destroying many of the world’s sellers’ markets, they can now start cashing in on the promises made to them when the Government only wanted them to work harder.

To workers, prosperity usually means sky high wages. But no sooner do they try to get them than the government intervenes, shaking its head and telling them that their wages are too high, that they are too prosperous. This must surprise shop assistants and farm workers and railwaymen and many others who earn hardly enough to keep themselves ticking over. It might interest and amuse other workers. For there is very little that is sane and organised about government wages policy. It is like a great game of snakes and ladders in which, for the wage-earners, there are too many snakes for comfort.

Then there is the curious case of British Railways. One of the theories behind nationalisation was that organisations like the railways could be run in the interests of the Capitalist class as a whole only it they were State controlled. Lord Chandos, as we point out elsewhere in this issue, has given the industrialists’ views on nationalisation. They want cheap and plentiful supplies and services, even if a nationalised concern must be run at a loss to supply them. But there has recently been considerable restlessness at the big deficits which the railways in this country have run up. Now there is a demand, pioneered by papers like The Economist, that British Railways ceases to operate as a service to Capitalism generally, cuts almost everything, but its profitable services and then picks the bones out of the rest. (Nobody has yet suggested that the Government suspend the interest commitments of British Transport Commission, which last year turned a working loss of £55 million into a deficit of £100 million).

Let us make it clear that, although its unprofitable railways may be a sore point to the Capitalists, no worker need worry whether his employer is doing well or not. But it is pertinent to consider the dilemma of Capitalism’s experts and planners. What sort of nationalised railways do they want? Do they even know what they want? And if they do know, can they get it?

This sort of disorder is not confined to Capitalism in England. Across the Atlantic, President Kennedy has let himself be seen sipping a glass of milk and has declared that in future no meal at the White House will be without it. Milk, he said, is delicious, nutritious and not at all radioactive. The reason for this publicity campaign is plain to see. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations have subsidised milk production and have supported the prices of milk products like butter and cheese. This has encouraged the American farmer to produce vast quantities of milk at the same time as consumption has fallen drastically. This has created a—dread word—surplus of milk which the President is doing his best to reduce by persuading people to drink as much of it as possible.

This all sounds fairly reasonable until we remember that milk is a food that can keep children alive and well—and that while the United States government is trying to pour the stall down unwilling American throats there are 650 million hungry children in the world who could put it to better use. Of course, Washington has its own reasons for not sending the milk where it is needed; they talk about budgets and farm prices and taxpayers. What it amounts to is that, even in cases of human survival, Capitalism often cannot deliver the goods where they are needed. Which does not make Capitalism seem a very sensible way of running things.

In fact, wherever we turn there is evidence which makes Capitalism seem the silliest of systems. That is why its politicians—the men who must run, defend and justify Capitalism—sometimes say the silliest things. Yet Capitalism has an inner sanity. Man started the thing off in his attempts to deal with the problems which were worrying him about a couple of hundred years ago. But we should not let it rest there. We still have problems to worry us. And we still have a way of solving them.

Ivan

Finance & Industry: Our educated politicians (1961)

The Finance and Industry column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our educated politicians

In an interview published in the Observer (8.1.61) the banker Lord Brand, asked if he thought that academic economists do more good than harm, replied that they are extremely valuable. He claimed that through the studies of Keynes and other economists knowledge has grown and this “has altered the whole picture of economic life”. Possibly because Lord Brand would hesitate to claim that economic life has altered particularly (“I do not think we have an easy time ahead of us in the next year or so”) he went on to blame the politicians for not accepting the good advice of the economists.

He recalled the reparations chaos after the first world war, when the politicians (backed however by 3 out of their 7 banking economic advisers) insisted on exacting impossible reparations from Germany. Lord Brand says: “It was clearly mad at the time to those who would, and could, see, and were prepared to act accordingly. But the people who had control of policy could not see”.

He singles out Lloyd George—”Like most statesmen of the day, he knew little or nothing of finance”—yet Lloyd George had been Chancellor of the Exchequer. But it appears, according to Lord Brand, that Lloyd George insisted on the mad policy because he had boasted of squeezing Germany “till the pip squeaked” and dared not back down for fear of losing political support among voters as blind as he was.

But in the second world war the statesmen appear not to have changed much. Lord Brand tells how Churchill and Roosevelt, on the advice of Morganthau, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and with the agreement of Lord Cherwell (a “highly intelligent” man) adopted a plan to reduce Germany to a purely agricultural country. Lord Cherwell’s defence of his action was that the British Government wanted a loan from America and acceptance of this fantastic plan would make it easier to get the loan.

Capitalism 1961

Lord Brand’s complacency about the altered picture of economic life reads oddly in face of the motor car slump and the looming difficulties facing international trade and currencies. The years between the wars were spent creating currency collapse in one country after another and then laboriously re-establishing stable currencies. After World War II it was all supposed to be different but now Professor Meade is warning of the drastic remedies that he thinks may be necessary because of America’s loss of gold, so he proposes that the dollar and the pound should be cut adrift from their existing link with gold.

The Guardian in an editorial (3.1.61) remarks “Undoubtedly a period of chaos would follow. Professor Meade feels sure that stability would return at a new level of exchange rates within six months. Perhaps so; but in the process the structure of the International Monetary Fund, one of the greatest achievements of international collaboration in our generation would have been laid in ruins “.

One prospect seen by the Guardian is that “soon the Russian rouble might be the only major currency with a fixed gold parity “.

This seems ironical to the Guardian but only because they persist against all evidence in believing that Russia is not a great capitalist power, but something else.

Flood Havoc in China

Through floods and storms China is threatened with what may be a catastrophic fall of food supplies. In a Socialist world such an event would be met by movement of supplies from elsewhere. But under capitalism a different set of values rules. America, Canada and other countries have masses of food they cannot sell profitably. The Times (20.12.60) reported that in the four chief exporting countries America, Canada, Argentina and Australia, “the end-of-season carry-over on July 31 next are expected to reach the unprecedented total of 60,400,000 tons, a rise of 7,500,000 tons on the year”.

So what problem can there be? But capitalist trade and rivalries create problems. The American government when it wanted to give wheat away or sell it cheaply met opposition from the other exporting countries, who feared this would reduce world prices and cut into their own sales. Secondly there are those who on political grounds would object to help being given to China, and according to Mr. Cyril Osborne, M.P., who was recently in Peking, there are politicians in that country who reply that the Chinese people “would rather starve than eat American food or accept American charity”. (Daily Telegraph, 3.1.61). (The starving might give a different answer).

According to Reynolds News (1.1.61) projected Canadian sales of their surplus to China are likely to meet with objections from the American government.

In the meantime the American food stocks are being nibbled at by the recently increased numbers of unemployed :

“In September 3,200,000 Americans were given food from the surplus supplies held by the government”. (Guardian 2.1.61).

Speculating in Misery

Under the heading “It’s an ill Wind” the Financial Times (9.1.61) had the following:

“Americans, by their law, may not trade with Communist China. But no law stops them speculating on the effects of China’s misfortunes, and for the past week they have been rushing to do just that. Scene of their operations is the Chicago soybean (spelt this way in America) market, biggest commodity futures market in the world.

The present bout of speculation in soya-beans and their products began three months ago, as reports of crop disaster began to seep through from China, only big soya-bean producer apart from America itself. People in the trade saw then that if the usual Chinese exports did not reach Europe, American beans and oil would have to go instead. So they put their money on a rise in the market.”

Edgar Hardcastle

Without comment (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade now. the gap between population growth and food production in Africa has been widening. On present trends, says the FAO. the continent will have 650m more people and an annual deficit in cereal supplies of 100m tonnes by the year 2010 — more than the current yearly volume of world trade in wheat. 

Such shortfalls in the developing world have come to seem particularly offensive at a time when industrialised countries are struggling with budget-busting food surpluses that they cannot sell. The contrast between the two is probably the most striking and frustrating paradox of our age. 

It leads many sympathetic people to suggest that the problem is not one of food production, but one of food distribution. Find a way of recycling the food surpluses of the North to the food deficit areas of the South, they argue, and the problem will be on its way to a solution. But that hardly seems an adequate long-term answer to the problems of hunger in countries which are without exception still agriculturally-based, and likely to remain so for many years. 

The conundrum can be put another way. There is a problem of distribution, to be sure, but it is more to do with money than with food. People are not hungry these days because food supplies are not available; they are hungry because they are poor. 

(Financial Times 4 September 1986)

Burn the mountains, say Euro experts (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A secret report by Common Market officials recommends destroying huge stocks of surplus butter, milk powder, beef and cereals and writing off more than £1.700 million of taxpayers' money. 

The report, by the European Commission's market management experts in the agricultural directorate argues that there never will be a market for a large proportion of the surplus stocks.

Agra Europe, said much of the surplus would be inedible long before it could be sold and that the food mountains were a huge burden on international markets.

Destroying them by burning or some other means would cut the Community's costs by eliminating storage charges and cutting interest payments.

(Western Daily Press 12 September 1986)

Running Commentary: Plenty (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plenty

Just as the news came in of yet another desperate famine in Africa, it was reported that the EEC are about to try to reduce their 1,360,000 tonne butter mountain by selling the stuff, at 3p a pound, as food for calves. EEC officials argue that this is the best way to dispose of the butter — best because it is cheaper than stockpiling it.

You did not need to be exceptionally perceptive to work out that what is being suggested is that the butter, after being kept in store for some time, be fed back to the animals who produced it in the first place.

There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about this. It fits in perfectly well with the assumptions and needs of commodity production — the turning out of wealth for sale on the market so as to yield a profit for the class who own the means of life. In this system the market — not human needs — decides when there is a shortage or a surplus. That the EEC is grappling with the problem of mountains and lakes of stuff which could feed human beings does not mean that everyone in the world is properly fed. It simply means that the market has more than it can profitably deal with, which is a very different matter.

It is by no means uncommon for food to be stockpiled or, if the market demands it, destroyed while there is an urgent human need for it. Sometimes — like the butter — it is returned where it came from. Vegetables are ploughed into the earth or fish thrown back into the sea. A neat, circular solution you might think — just what all those highly trained experts and economists are paid to think up. Until you look at the pictures of those people starving; the children only hours away from death staring out from shrunken, fly-swarming eyes, the emaciated adults squatting in their final apathy.

Then you know that something is wrong, that somewhere there is an obvious answer which is being evaded. And you are right. But think about it a bit more and ask yourself, who is doing the evading?

Cut price ignorance

Anyone who is thinking about buying a few shares in newly privatised concerns like British Gas, Jaguar and the National Freight Corporation had better brace themselves to receive a letter from Norman Tebbit. The Tory Party chairman, presumably believing that the most impoverished of workers can be kidded that owning some shares makes them a capitalist, will be trying to scare them with bogeyman stories about Labour snatching their dividends to give to lazy dole-queue scroungers.

If you think this smacks of desperation, what about the other scheme at Tory HQ. to attract new recruits by offering them a clutch of cut-price offers? Sign on the blue dotted line and you'll be eligible for a cheap subscription rate to the Countdown discount organisation; the chance to buy gift hampers; membership of a wine society; copies of Jeffrey Archer's books, personally signed by the world's greatest living writer (it is not clear whether this is intended to persuade people into the Tory Party or the Workers' Revolutionary Party).

Of course Labour supporters are having a great time poking fun at all this, on the lines that the Tory Party which was once a marriage bureau is now a mail order company. Well, nobody can argue with that but they should remember that all capitalist parties use a variety of tricks and inducements to get workers to join them.

You can join the Labour Party, for example. by simply signing a form brandished at you by some canvasser on your doorstep. A few minutes later, if you were getting a lot of attention from canvassers, you could join the Conservative Party in the same way. Your opinions need not come into it; the capitalist parties are interested in your support — your vote, your money, your membership.

It is difficult to understand, or to empathise with, workers who fall for this, who allow their intelligence to be insulted in this way and who regard so lightly their political power to transform society.

Capitalism's problems can be solved only by a social revolution. That needs mass consciousness. leading to a deliberate act by the world working class. That is fundamentally different from the sordid grubbing for votes which absorbs so much of the energy of the likes of the Labour and Tory Parties. The question is — how long will the workers allow themselves to be seduced away from their historic role by tawdry offers of cheap wine, food and political thrills? How long will they abandon their revolutionary function for a mess of Jeffrey Archer?

Kick off

Every schoolchild brought up on Henry Newbolt's foolish poem about playing the game knows that the British are great ones for courtesy and sporting behaviour. It is something to do with character building on the playing fields of Eton, and the historic mission of the British Empire to bring civilisation to the lesser breeds without the law.

The snag is that most of the people of this country did not go to Eton, or to any school like it. Their character was built in the sort of neighbourhoods and schools which Newbolt did not care much to write about. They get their living in ways which essentially deprive them of the satisfaction of a sense of affinity with what they must devote most of their waking hours to.

This alienation extends beyond the workplace. into every part of our lives. In a world which is owned and controlled by "them", what does it matter if the saplings which were planted to give a little relief to the eyes amid a wasteland of concrete are tom up? Or if the street lamps which are there to make the pavements safer to walk along are smashed? Or if the ugly slabs of building which they call home are defaced with spray- can graffiti?

It also permeates what might be called their leisure time activities, when for a brief time they may forget their lowly status in society and the aridity of their social prospects. Where better to do this than on the terraces at some football game, with its excitement, glamour and its aura of quick riches?

British followers of the game are famous, not for their sporting attitudes but for such activities as running riot (although not as wildly as the media would have it) in one of the plushest of those floating duty-free supermarkets which ply between this country and the Continent.

This sort of behaviour has now reached the status of a ritual without which no self-respecting football (and soon, perhaps, cricket) match is complete The responses, too, are ritualistic, spurred on by headline-hungry journalists. The popular assumption, for which evidence is conspicuously lacking, is that sterner punishment and more vicious judicial violence are the only measures which can be trusted to bear in on the minds of the riotous football fans.

The people who call for hooligans to be beaten into servility forget those times when worse than yobbishness against foreign workers is officially encouraged — when, for example, the habit of Ghurka soldiers in the Falklands to kill any Argentinians who surrendered to them was gloatingly reported as good, clean, military fun.

It is capitalism which alienates us all — a social system of privilege and repression which is maintained with ritualistic support from the working class: "I vote Labour because my father always did '; "My husband's a Conservative and I can't go against him. can I?"

All this viciousness and self-destruction is protected in swathes of cynicism, from the beginning of our lives until the end. That is why schoolchildren are still being encouraged to absorb patriotic ravings like Newbolt's. Play up. and play the game? Ugh.

It’s a crazy world (1985)

From the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is society barmy or am I? Reading the newspapers it is hard to tell whether the reader is failing to appreciate the subtle beneficence of the system or whether, as seems strikingly obvious, the entire social order is an ill- disguised mad-house.

At the end of September BBC radio announced that a dangerous criminal was on the loose. He had already murdered his sister and had phoned his brother with a promise that he was next to be killed. The "dangerous criminal" in question was described as "deranged", which is not a bad word for a character who goes around killing people. Oddly enough, the BBC reporter was at pains to tell us that the criminal in question was a "Falklands War Veteran". Only a few years ago this now deranged criminal had been doing his bit for Queen and Country. Now. "doing his bit" is not a bad word to describe what happens when a soldier puts on a uniform and. with the government patting him on the back, engages in indiscriminate killing of workers he has never met. Which might sound like the behaviour of a dangerous criminal. But we would be wrong: our friend, the veteran. was a glorious hero when he was killing the hirelings of his master's enemy. He whose deranged criminality we are urged to condemn today was given a medal when he had acted under orders.

If the killer who couldn't break the habit when the war ended is caught he will be sent to a psychiatrist who will tell him, in pseudo-scientific jargon, that he is a sinner. (Shrinks are only the exorcists of a world which pretends to be modern.) If two psychiatrists consider that he is a danger to himself or other people he can be locked away without his consent — just as during war-time conscription, if a doctor says you are fit you can be ordered to become a killer without your consent. But if those who are a danger to themselves and others can be incarcerated, according to the terms of the Mental Health Act. why haven't they got Michael Heseltine yet or the military generals or the rest of the legalised murder establishment?

Talking of mind-doctors, if you ever go to a psychiatrist and complain that you are being watched by someone who is out to destroy you, there is every chance you will be suspected of paranoia. When capitalist nations think that potential destroyers are watching them it is called a "spy scandal". And workers are urged to get cross because those Red bastards are out to discover our secrets. It is hard, just for the moment, for most workers to think of a secret which the Russian spies will be out to get from us. Do they really send spies over to Britain to find out that Mr. Smart of 44 Acacia Avenue has a pile of porno magazines tucked under his mattress and Miss Squint, the regular Church-goer, is having a non-platonic relationship with six choirboys? Workers have no secrets worth stealing; the secrets which the KGB comes to get are as much secret from us as they are from them.

While "spy scandals" go on and phone-in pundits declare war on "the Soviets" (not realising that they were destroyed by the Bolsheviks well before 1921). the ruling class of Britain and Russia do not allow such trivia to get in the way of trade. SPY EXPULSIONS FAIL TO ROCK TRADE BOAT was the Sunday Times Business News headline in the week of the so-called scandal:

Britain's trade with Russia is set to rise above the spy dramas of the past fortnight. A major Anglo-Soviet commercial treaty could be signed by the end of next month and British companies are strong contenders for two £1 billion petrochemical plant contracts (22 September).

British exports to the Russian Empire rose by 65 per cent last year, but Paul Channon. Tory Trade Minister, is not happy that "our" exports are far less than those from West Germany. France and Italy. He is anxious to point out that "British companies should be in a strong position to help improve the Soviet Union's backward agricultural and food processing industries". And we thought they were enemies! Or could the Minister of Trade be a KGB agent?

On 28 September the Guardian's Brussels correspondent informed us of a plan to dispose of the EEC butter mountain by feeding it to the cattle:

The idea is to mix elderly butter from the one million tonne mountain with more conventional feedstuffs for calves. This, says farm commissioner Frans Andriessen. will have a "positive effect" on veal.

Well, it’s nice to think that butter will have a positive effect on veal; the elderly and unemployed workers who can afford neither veal nor butter will be delighted to read about such positive effects. Alas, like all great schemes dreamed up by attendants of the asylum.' the Andriessen plan has a weakness: there is currently a 785,000 tonne beef and veal mountain in the EEC. So. if the butter helps to increase veal production that will simply be shifting one surplus to another place. There is. of course, the idea of letting people eat the butter and the veal, but. . . well, let's stick to "serious" ideas, shall we?

Steve Coleman

So They Say: The Reason Why (1977)

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

The Reason Why

A bewildered assistant is no assistant at all; the Conservatives have got one of theirs, Margot Lawrence, “flummoxed”. Judging by her contribution to the columns of the Daily Telegraph on the 30th August, this is probably no difficult achievement in any event. She became concerned to clarify the “highly emotive phrase” “production for use, not profit”, which some dastardly Socialists argue from time to time. Writing under the title “Isn’t production for profit?” she is puzzled why the Conservatives are “failing to use the strongest argument in their own book”:

That production for use is production for profit, the two are intertwined and inseparable.

Notwithstanding Margot Lawrence’s view that “almost all people do have enough money for what they really need”, we suggest that one of the reasons the rest of the Conservative Party does not argue along the lines she proposes is that such a contention could not be sustained.

Production in capitalist society is carried on because the owners of the means of production realize a profit from selling their commodities. All of these commodities are considered useful by the purchaser, whether they be the lawn-mowers used as an illustration in the article or weapons of mass destruction used in war. When production in certain fields would be unprofitable however, no owner will advance capital for such production. Vast numbers of the world’s population do not starve because food would not be “useful”, they starve because it is unprofitable to feed them.

When the Socialist says “production for use”, he is saying: abandon the form of society in which society’s needs are assessed in terms of the minority’s requirement for profit.

Problems and . . . More Problems

We give below two excerpts from newspapers which illustrate this particular point. Capitalism has an apparently uncanny ability to produce social problems. A study of the foundations on which it is based show in fact that it cannot fail to do otherwise. Although it would be naive to suggest that Socialist society will not face problems, we will be able to devote our fullest efforts towards solving them and preventing new problems from arising.

In capitalism we have surely reached a pinnacle of absurdity when the means are available to solve, for instance, the problem of starvation, but the possible avenues for tackling the first problem, through only partial application, create a “problem” of precisely the opposite nature. We are sometimes asked what Socialism will be like: we can predict now that the newspapers of Socialism will not need to carry items like these.

The Community [EECJ is being chased by an ever-increasing milk surplus. It is about to operate what is described in the jargon of Brussels as a “corresponsibility levy”, in other words a penalty against farmers for producing too much milk . . . Milk is a tiresome commodity for the EEC to handle since it is expensive to store and difficult to sell to anybody else . . . the official intervention stores are often the only outlet for it.

The Times, 5th September 77

Asia’s major hope for future development, the “green revolution”, is now failing to keep pace with the rapid growth ir. population, and this will condemn a quarter of mankind to continued poverty,, hunger, malnutrition and unemployment.

The Times, 6th September 77

First Things First

The well known Conservative bull-frog, Reginald Maudling, has been croaking on the difficulties faced by industrialists because of the governing consideration of profitability. The aforementioned Margot Lawrence would do well to note his passionate comments. Mr. Maudling, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, had this to say in a published letter:

With the possible exception of the strike-ridden motor car industry, it seems to me clear that potential supply is far greater than existing demand. Maybe potential supply has been reduced by discouraging investment, but there is no doubt whatsoever from every bit of evidence that emerges from industry, that what is holding back supply at the moment is not capacity, but inadequate demand.

The Times, 2nd September 77

He was writing a week before Ford Motor Company’s decision to build an £180m engine plant in South Wales, but even so his comments do not seem so wide of the mark, as Ford is making it clear “that the new plant did not point to plans for a huge increase in total car production”.

The problem of “inadequate demand" seems an odd one at first glance. Can this be anything other than a campaign of stubbornness by members of the working class? Why, at the present moment the majority are forced to live in circumstances where the watchword is Cheapness; one-and-a-half million of the blighters are out of work entirely. You would think they were able to make plenty of “adequate” demands for the sake of the frustrated industrialists. “Ah, but wait a minute,” will say the latter. "They may have plenty of demands —but have they got the money to go with them?”

Miracle Man

It may not be the second coming, but it is a present-day equivalent. When the Associated Television Corporation began making their fiction-film Jesus of Nazareth, we recall Lew Grade, the group chairman and chief executive, muttering about it being made because it would be meaningful, important and so on. Some may have mistakenly imagined these comments related to the content of the film.

Zeffirelli’s majestic production of ‘Jesus of Nazareth" was first shown in this country on Palm Sunday, 3rd April 1977. It achieved immediate success both at home and abroad. In Britain, the audiences amounted to 21 million viewers; in the USA to over 91 million and in Italy 84 per cent saw the film. I have no hesitation in saying that this film, representing ATV's largest single film-production investment, will prove an asset of inestimable wealth to the company and provide a valuable annuity over the years to come.

The Times 8th September 1977

Lord Grade (as he is now called) had taken a full page advertisement to publicise ATV’s results. Although he refers to the “inestimable wealth” resulting from the film, share-holders like to have their information in more precise terms.

The results speak from themselves. The pre-tax profit figure is £11,161,000, the highest in the 22 years history of the company, and shows an increase of 81 per cent over 1976.

Thus we learn, in the words of the good book, exactly what it shall profit a man.

Tony D'Arcy

Sting in the Tail: An Outbreak of Truth (1989)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Outbreak of Truth

Edwina Currie the former Under Secretary of Health had to resign because she upset a powerful section of the capitalist class.

Her comment on ITV 3rd December, '88 that "most of the egg production in this country is now infected by salmonella" caused an uproar among that section of the capitalist class who have their capital invested in egg production. As sales, and of course profits, fell they mounted a campaign to get rid of her.

Now socialists have no sympathy with capitalist lick-spittles like Currie. Her insulting remarks on workers dying of hypothermia (lack of food and warmth) — "they should knit themselves woolly nightcaps” — recall the "let them eat cake" of the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy.

But her forced resignation is really somewhat unique. She had to resign because she told the truth!

An outbreak of truth in the Houses of Parliament would certainly be extremely refreshing. Say Nigel Lawson admitting that capitalism controls governments and not the other way about. That he is powerless to control slumps and booms. Or Neil Kinnock admitting that he is opposed to socialism and just wants to run the buying and selling system.

Alas, it appears that truth is less catching than salmonella and Edwina Currie's case is an isolated one.

Lake Plonk

A search through a European Atlas will not reveal its location. But it's there somewhere . . . unchartered, its location unsuspected.

It's Surplusland, a European country with a weird geography. We know something of its topography from newspaper reports. It has Beef Hills, Butter Mountains and a Wine Lake.

In The Independent 24 January ' 89 we were given some of the details of the Wine Lake.

There were 250 million gallons of surplus alcohol (distilled wine alcohol) for disposal last year. Another 118 million gallons is expected this year. A further 92 million gallons is due for disposal Inside of the next three years.

Why not give it away?, you ask. Well to those of you who fancy a couple of free glasses of wine with your Salmonella Chicken Supreme, the Select Committee on European Legislation (Third Report) has the answer.

In practice there appears to be little demand for wine alcohol as such which reflects the cost of production .

In other words — it's not profitable !

A society that produces and stores surpluses of beef, butter, wheat and wine while millions starve is an absolute obscenity.

It's not Cricket

Annoyed at the cricketing authorities' decision to ban players from the England Test team If they played in South Africa, Mr. Norris McWhirter of the Freedom Association has attempted to take action through the courts.

The Independent 25th January, 1989 referring to the Association's defence of Zola Budd and its recent cricket legal case, stated:

The inevitable conclusion is that it must support the race policies of the South African government but this is not so. Both cases the association says, concern the freedom of individuals to carry out their business or affairs as they chose without interference from bullying authorities.

Mr. McWhirter's organisation makes great play of defending a sportsman or woman's right to go anywhere they wish in their sporting careers irrespective of politics.

This apparent disinterest in politics seems a little strange when one recalls that the same McWhirter wrote to British athletes prior to the Moscow Olympics urging them not to go to that country because of Russia's invasion of j Afghanistan.

Writing to Linsey MacDonald, the Scottish runner, he referred to athletes who didn't win medals and said:

. . . having gained no medals you will have earned the contempt of millions of your countrymen.

Such a letter to a sixteen year old schoolgirl is as good an example of bullying as we’ve come across.

The whitewash attempt of The Independent should fool no one. The Freedom Association is just another bunch of well-heeled toffs anxious to protect their class privilege against any real or imagined threat.

Its deep involvement in the Grunwick dispute of 1976, its anti-trade union stance recently against the postal workers proves that "freedom" to the quaintly named "Freedom Association" means freedom to exploit and grow fat on the unpaid labour of the working class.

What's up Doc ?

David Mellor, the Minister of State for Health, is concerned at the long hours worked by junior hospital doctors.

But not too concerned, for according to The Independent 25th January 1989:

But he confirmed the government's intention to oppose the backbench Bill scheduled for debate In the Lords tonight setting a 72 hour maximum legal limit on the junior doctor's working week.

After a survey in Bristol of junior doctors Dr. Ruth Gilbert (quoted In The Independent same day) said :

Suffering from sleep deprivation, Junior doctors are likely to perform monotonous tasks badly, make mistakes over drug dosages and experience mood changes that will make them less sympathetic to their patients.

When asked about the worst aspects of their work 85 per cent of the men and 95 per cent of the women said "exhaustion and hours of work" followed by "acting as dogsbodies doing unrewarding work."

In February 1848 a pamphlet written in German was published in London. It referred to the position of doctors inside capitalism. It stated:

The bourgeoise has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The pamphlet was The Communist Manifesto. The authors were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

50 Years Ago: Subsidizing food destruction (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the first pieces of legislation to be presented to the House of Commons this session has been the Horticulture (Special Payments) Bill. The intention of this bill is to provide for payments to be made to commercial growers of horticultural products, especially growers of apples and pears, facing ‘special difficulties’ as a result of Britain’s entry into the Common Market.(…..)

As we have pointed out before, governments, of whatever political persuasion, exist to protect the interests of the capitalist class (ie, the owners of the means of life). This they do in a number of ways — tariff barriers and subsidies to producers for example — always bearing in mind that by such measures they expect a healthier national capitalism to be the outcome.

The Horticulture (Special Payments) Bill is just such a measure, and has been welcomed as such. Payments are to be made to growers of apples and pears who discontinue production. The scheme is expected to cost £4.5 million to £5 million over the period 1974-78. This figure is far in excess of the £440,000 spent up to mid 1972 under a similar scheme (see Socialist Standard January 1973). There are to be checks on the growers who apply for the ‘grubbing up’ subsidy to ensure that the orchards dug up are not replanted for at least five years. In effect the government are subsidising the destruction of productive resources.

In this way, it is hoped, the competitive efficiency of British horticulture will be improved by reducing the amount of produce reaching the market. As a result market prices are expected to continue their upward trend after a period during the ’sixties when prices stagnated while costs increased. ‘Surpluses’, that is more being produced than the market can absorb profitably, could upset this state of affairs. As Roger Moate, M.P. for the Kent constituency of Faversham, pointed out:

‘It needs only a small amount of surplus at any moment to disrupt the market entirely, and a grower can quickly lose almost his annual profit because of the disruption’ (Hansard, 16 November, 1973).

So once again, in a world where food is short, market considerations get priority over the needs of people. All we need now is for a cynic to point out that the trees dug up could help to alleviate the fuel crisis.

(From the article Subsidizing Food Destruction by Gwynn Thomas, Socialist Standard, January 1974)

Bitter harvest (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Record cereal harvests in Britain and the whole Common Market were forecast at the Royal Show yesterday, foreshadowing a major budgetary headache for Brussels bureaucrats struggling desperately to keep burgeoning and costly surpluses in check.

The record. 171 million metric tons for the EEC harvest, was forecast by Mr Simon Gourlay, president of the National Farmers’ Union.

With a harvest of this size in prospect, he said, by November there would be tremendous pressure on the Brussels Commission to introduce direct measures to rationalise European cereals production at the earliest possible opportunity.

He did not speculate at Stoneleigh on what form this rationalisation might take, but today he is to have talks in Brussels on the NFU's ideas for a set-aside scheme to take excess cereal-growing land out of grain production.

(from the Daily Telegraph, 9 July 1987)

Abundance and poverty (1960)

From the September 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The point is often made, and in the material sense has some truth, that workers in some of the Western countries have never had it so good, and in relationship to the “Hungry Thirties” in Britain, it looks good. Unemployment in this country is very low, and the majority of workers in comparison to the Thirties are not so badly off. Capitalism is, of course, in a boom period that in some countries seems to go on for ever. If this is true, and we accept it for the sake of discussion, does this mean that our case has lost its validity? The answer is no. Socialism is a world wide system of society and we cannot reiterate this too much, so let us look at comparisons of wealth.

In America, surplus wheat which is rotting in storehouses, costs the Administration $370,000 a day rent to store after the Government has bought it at fixed prices. There is also a world surplus of sugar of some 13.7 million tons. On the other hand, 1,700 million people are today living without sufficient food and shelter, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations. Again, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief reports that food production in North America is up 20 per cent, and surplus wheat amounts to 1,382,000 bushels a year, and yet in the Far East there is less to eat than before the war. It follows therefore that the problems of the underfed and under-clothed is also our problem, wherever workers may be throughout the world.

There are both sympathisers and opponents of our case who say we do not support the struggles of these peoples to improve their conditions: this is not true. We support them in the only way that we can—with Socialist propaganda, showing that the movements to which they often give support are nationalistic in outlook and that they are aiming at changing masters and not the social system. A classic example of this is India, where they threw off the yoke of British Imperialism, but the Indian workers remain wage slaves.

Our task is not one of defending capitalism, in whatever guise. If we were to deviate from our purpose, of the establishment of Socialism, we would completely lose our identity and become another reformist party, one of the many who have made promises that could never be kept, within the framework of capitalism. No, the only solution lies in the understanding by the working class of the working of capitalism and the need for a classless, moneyless society.

Wheat farmers in America may not even be aware of the needs of society their first concern must be the profit made by sale of their corn. Wheat can rot in the storehouse of the North American continent and Indian workers can starve rather than sell the food at a loss. That is the stupidity of a profit making system. Socialism can and will provide the material and cultural needs of society as soon as the working class abolish for all time throughout the world a system that can produce super-abundance and poverty hand in hand.

Workers in the western hemisphere may think they are having it good.  Many families who run a car can now join the harassing and killing queues that line our roads every weekend or in the evenings they can watch .the “goggle-box" that churns out in the main a load of rubbish. And in the background the frightening spectacle of rockets with nuclear warheads that can traverse the world. Real wealth in human labour power that is dissipated on Blue Streaks, rockets or nuclear powered submarines could be put to the job of solving the real needs of the backward peoples, food, clothing and shelter and the right to live sane and intelligent lives.

The truth of the matter is we never had it so bad, and until workers realise that the problem of the eastern workers is fundamentally the same as that of his western counterpart, the capitalist world will blunder from crisis to crisis. To African workers we make a special plea. You are throwing off the yoke of imperialism and taking on the characteristics of national capitalism. Don't ask or expect us to support the various movements for Colonial freedom. We will not jump onto any nationalist bandwaggon in order to gain your support. Your problems in the last analysis are the same as ours. We want you to have a better life, and this you can only attain in a Socialist society.

Johnny Edmonds

Cooking the Books: The world could produce more food (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

“OF COURSE WE CAN FEED THE WORLD – JUST LOOK AT ALL THE UNUSED SPACE” was the headline of a recent “opinion” article by Ross Clark in the Times (26 June).

Clark, a supporter of the market (who thinks that any opponent of the “free” market is a “Marxist”), argues that food production has fallen, so causing the present shortages, because in previous decades it had been overproduced. It is of course obscene to talk of “too much” food being produced when there are millions in the world who are starving, but he means “too much” in relation to paying demand. Even so, his explanation exposes the irrational way in which the capitalist system works.

According to him:

“The reason for the fall in cereal production over 15 years has not been soil degradation or climate change: while crops yields are not increasing as fast as they were doing in the 1960s, they have still risen by 1-2 per cent per annum over the past 15 years. Rather, the decrease in production has been a straightforward response to overproduction. Remember the grain mountains of the 1980s? They resulted in a collapse in prices that in turn persuaded grain producers to contract their operation. Now that prices are rising again the opposite has happened: the FAO estimates that this year’s wheat harvest will rise by 13 per cent as a result of extra planting, putting downward pressure on prices next year.”

He points out that today:

“the background to rising food prices is the shrinkage of global agriculture over the past decade and a half. Globally, less food is being produced on even less land than was the case in the early 1990s. Take the US, which according to the FAO was producing 1,210kg of cereals per person per year between 1990 and 1992 and 1,104 kg between 2001 and 2003. Or Canada, at one time the ‘world’s bread basket’, where cereal production fell from 1,905 kg per person per year in 1990-92 to 1,384 kg in 2001-03.”

Given the current strong paying demand for food, the 1990s levels may well be reached again but this would satisfy only paying demand. What about those who can’t pay?

Though it is far from his intention, Clark provides information which shows that enough food could be produced to satisfy their food needs too. Of course it won’t be, and never will be, under the capitalist market system which he supports. But it could be in a socialist world where production would no longer be limited to what can be sold.

Clark writes:

“the total landmass cultivated for arable crops in 2006, according Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), was 1.402 billion hectares – or 14 million sq km. In other words, all the world’s cereals and vegetables are grown on an area equivalent to the USA and half of Canada. A further 34 million sq km – equivalent to the rest of North America, South America and two thirds of Australia – is given over to grazing, much of it extensive, unimproved grassland. The rest of the world – equivalent to the whole of Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia plus a third of Australia – is not used for food production in any way. Some of this land, of course, is desert, mountain or rainforest, which either cannot be used for agriculture at all or would require irrigation, engineering or clearance. But a vast amount of it could quite easily be converted into agriculture, but has until now not been needed.”

What does he mean “has not been needed”? Of course it’s been needed! What Clark means again is that it has not been needed to meet paying demand. Socialists say that it is needed to end world hunger but will only be able to be used for this when once the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all humanity. That’s the only basis on which these currently unused resources can be used to meet the food needs of everyone, not just of those who can afford to pay.

The blind spot (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

There Is a blind spot in thinking, under capitalism, that affects the most brilliant minds in almost every field, a blind spot having to do with the basics of commodities. Let us illustrate our point by looking at the question of food, of feeding the hungry populations of the world.

Recently, a Nobel Prize was awarded an expert in the science of wheat growing. This scientist, by his research, had so contributed to the knowledge of wheat that it now becomes possible to raise enormous crops of that basic food in areas in which it was hitherto impossible. Wonderful! But there is one serious problem, one flaw in the ointment that isn’t even considered and this, despite the many, many examples in the past of the same problem. Wheat is not produced principally with the idea of feeding hungry people. It is produced for sale on the market with view to profit. No profit, no wheat production. It is as simple as that.

Do you think there is anything untrue about this statement? Then let us remind you of miracle rice, for example. Only a year or so ago a new hybrid rice, several times more prolific than traditional rice, had been developed by the International Rice Research Institute and financed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Did this result in the masses of people in rice-consuming areas of the world now being able to get enough to eat? Of course not. What happened was that the vastly increased harvest flooded the rice market and large quantities of that food had to be destroyed because of inadequate storage and marketing facilities. As reported in The Western Socialist of July-August, 1969, a United States aid official in the Philippines remarked: “We never thought about marketing — we were concentrating on production.”

Or take the subject of oranges. We are told by nutrition scientists that the vitamins contained in oranges are vital in maintaining good health. Is there anybody who actually believes that every child in America is able to get all of the oranges they need? The potential for distribution of oranges In the United States — the richest country in the world — is far, far greater than orange production. Yet the orange growers of Florida, according to a recent news story, are searching for new markets for their commodity other than food because they are producing far more of the fruit than the food market can possibly absorb and this spells disaster for their prices. (One remembers those vast mountains of oranges that were plied up In California during the Hungry Thirties, doused with gasoline, and burned, while armed guards stood watch to keep needy people away.)

Whom shall we blame? The orange growers? The wheat growers? The rice growers? Ridiculous! Why should one blame them? Are they their poor millions of brothers’ and sisters' keepers? Or should we blame the Government? But the Government is the executive committee of the ruling class, the capitalist class, regardless of which political party forms the Government. This is capitalism. the market economy, the system of society in which all of the things people need to survive and to make life worth living are produced in order that surplus value may continue to be produced. To blame individual capitalists or the Government makes as little sense as handing out Nobel Awards to scientists who discover methods of producing food in abundance in an economy where food must not be produced in abundance.

The problem will be solved when the majority of us stop supporting political parties that promise to make capitalism operate uncapitalistically. For political parties and governments do not operate capitalism, capitalism operates them. And that is why the World Socialist Party of the United States does not want your support for anything short of an outright abolition of capitalism and the institution of a system based upon production for use by all who inhabit the earth. Examine your blind spot and investigate world socialism!

More Follies (1960)

From the August 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Ah, woe is me,” exclaims Ophelia, appalled at Hamlet’s apparent madness. What cries of woe are we today then to raise at the folly and madness of modern capitalism. At least it could be said of Hamlet’s madness that it was an “antic disposition,” put on all the better to mislead those around him. But what are we to say of the world around us which reverses the situation exactly. Every elaborate method and device is used to assure us that the present money-and profit-making society is the sanest possible way of life and that any suggestions to the contrary are sheer lunacy. All the more reason for the Socialist to persist in his condemnation of capitalism as an utterly crazy and insane system.

Take, for example, the “artichoke war” in France. Apparently this summer has seen in Britanny a record crop of this vegetable. Instead of everybody jumping with delight at this welcome bounty of nature, the growers and sellers are very perturbed and about 7,000 tons (calculated to represent 15 million artichokes) have been allowed to rot. The reason? The price offered to the growers was so low that most of them refused to sell out for a loss. To make sure the price was not further depressed, they have been driving them to disused quarries after trying unsuccessfully to sell them on the markets, and have then sprayed them with diesel oil to prevent the public getting completely free artichokes. Times, (29/6/60).

Under Socialism, of course, we would use artichokes for eating and diesel oil for running diesel engines. What a commentary it is on our present system that in France they use the one to destroy the other.

An interesting sidelight to the above affair is contained in the Times of 2/7/60. Here we find that the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations is launching an international campaign to promote a better understanding of the problem of providing enough food for the present and future population of the world. Our aim, says Mr. Sen, the Director-General, is to increase public and government awareness of the extent and cause of hunger and malnutrition. Perhaps Mr. Sen could begin his crusade of enlightenment by explaining to us why the aforementioned artichokes (not to speak of the millions of bushels of stored-up wheat in U.S. granaries) are not distributed to those in need of them. Elsewhere, Mr. Sen tells us that “hunger is seldom the result of nature’s harshness; it is often the result of ignorance and human failure.” Very true. Ignorance that the primary purpose of capitalist production is the making of profit and not the satisfaction of human needs, and human failure (including Mr. Sen’s) to replace it with a productive system concerned only with satisfying these needs.

Max Judd

Australia takes guard (1956)

From the August 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sure fire subject of conversation with almost any reticent Englishman in the summer of 1956, is the latest Test match score, and many a City gent, on bearing of another fallen wicket must have locked his office door and with his umbrella shown himself just how he would have put Lindwall away to the boundary.

Yet not all the headlines about an Australian “fightback” and “aggression” need refer to happenings at Lord's or Old Trafford, for in the pot of international disputes there is something of a trade war brewing up between England and Australia. The director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Agricultural Economics has said in Canberra that Britain's “attitudes, policies and behaviour” are “unfair” and “reprehensible” and among the mumblings of Australian politics is that of Mr. John McEwen, Minister of Trade, who has recently described his government as “hurt” by Britain's trading policies. Mr. McEwen, with a substantial press backing, is currently peddling a “get tough with Britain” line.

What are the reasons for this tetchiness in Canberra? First, Australia's trade with the U.K. is badly out of balance—in the nine months ended in March of this year she imported goods from Britain worth £A269 million compared to exports in return of only £A181½ million. Then there is the matter of wheat, of which Australia is one of the world's major exporters. The stockpiling scramble of the Korean war caused a vastly increased production of wheat and a consequent fall in its price. The end of the boom left Australia, growing some of the cheapest wheat in the world, with an unsellable surplus and looking sourly on the British policy of supporting home production on the one hand and preferring to buy Argentine wheat on the other.

Another source of irritation is the present state of trading preferences. In the Ottawa agreement of 1932 Britain and Australia agreed to grant entry to each other's imports at a lower duty than they charged on other countries goods. Australia accepted a preference based on fixed duties and the benefits of this have dwindled in our post-war inflation, just as money which was banked in 1932 has by now been devalued. But Britain secured a preference based on a percentage of their exports values and this has enabled her to keep a relative advantage on the Australian market. So a measure which was supposed to promote international friendship has turned out to be a cause of dissension; but there is nothing new in that.

To ease her problems Australia would like the U.K. to restrict imports of cheap wheat (unless, of course, it comes from Australia) and to re-negotiate the Ottawa pact so as to give Australian products new preferences. The difficulty in the way of both these suggestions is Britain's membership of G.A.T.T., whose rules forbid any such moves. Even so, Australia is pressing for a new. comprehensive Commonwealth trade agreement; this was one of the points raised by Mr. Menzies at the recent London conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. If Australia cannot gain any concessions here, she may, in return, take steps to end her status as Britain's largest single export market.

Meantime in the past few years Australia has several times drastically reduced its imports, the latest of these restrictions being introduced on July 1st. last. These cuts were designed to prune Australia's imports by about £32 million in a full year. In addition Australia is making a strong bid to capture as much as possible of the U!k.’s trade with New Zealand.

Another reason for the deepening rift between the two countries is the change in the strategic relations of the Pacific since the war's end. Before the sharpening of the Russo-American conflict Australia's military interests extended to the Middle East. Now that Asia is a centre of tension these interests have been forced back to the Pacific, where the gap left by Great Britain's waning power has been largely filled by that of America. Increasingly, Australia is dependent on the United States to keep intact her perilous existence between the great powers on the one hand and an almost indifferent Asia on the other. Whitehall gets hardly a look in.

Now the conclusion which we can draw from all this is that the much-boosted bonds of the British Commonwealth of Nations do not hold against the pressures of Capitalist competition and international conflict. Australia, as a normal Capitalist power, has trading interests which she will defend in any way open to her, even if that should mean offending her partners in the Commonwealth. For example, the recent import cuts came at a particularly bad time for the struggling British car industry but, as The Economist has put it, “trade cuts across politics.” Even the politics of the supposedly united British Commonwealth and with the government of the traditionally Empire-fostering Tory party bossing it in Whitehall.

Australia's position in the affairs of international trade and conflict was neatly depicted by Manchester Guardian cartoonist David Low just after the Foreign Ministers’ conference a couple of years ago at Geneva. His sketch showed a path bordering a lake and into the picture from the left ran Anthony Eden, dressed as a nursemaid, dragging behind him a pram full of tattered Union Jacks. As he ran he stretched out an imploring hand to another nannie, scampering off to the right with her pram. This one was identified as United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. His pram was labelled “American Sphere of Responsibility” and it held a lot of bonny babies of various Far Eastern nationalities. One of the bounciest, sucking a stick of striped candy, was called “Australia.”

Ivan.

50 Years Ago: Misery from Surplus, Profit from Disaster (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

[. . .] One of America’s problems is too many potatoes. The Government pays the farmer the guaranteed price for his potato crop on the farm, then the farmer pays a trifling price to the Government and buys them back again, but only on condition that he does not sell them in the market but uses them as animal feeding stuff. He can if he likes let them rot. Some potatoes are painted with blue dye so that they cannot illicitly be sold to the public for human consumption.

The truth is that capitalism can produce a surplus in terms of the market, the final result of which will be a cutting down of production, but it never has produced enough of all the things human beings need to satisfy their requirements.

The powers of production reached under capitalism could, if fully used and if devoted to human needs instead of being largely wasted on armaments, etc., satisfy all the requirements of the human race. But to allow them to be so used would wreck the complex and delicate marketing and profit-making organisation of the capitalist system.

(From editorial, Socialist Standard, May 1950)

Finance and Industry: Advice for Speculators (1960)

The Finance and Industry column from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economic Forecasting

In this and other countries the collection and analysis of industrial, trading and financial information has greatly increased since the war, and goes on increasing. Governments and private organisations are alike involved, but there is no likelihood at all that they are ever going to reach a degree of accuracy comparable with forecasts of tides, sunrise and eclipses.

The Observer (5-6-60) had a telling example of inability to agree, in Mr. Shonfield’s column. He reported that two organisations of economists had analysed the present economic situation and made a forecast for the rest of the year. The two organisations are the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the London and Cambridge Economic Service. Mr. Shonfield writes:—

The whole National Institute argument turns out . . . . to be a statement of the reasons why the last six months or so have been a period of exceptional strain on the balance of payments, add why this is unlikely to continue. The other report, the London & Cambridge Economic Bulletin takes just the opposite point of view—that the strains are all to come.

Much of the difference in the conclusions arose from the two widely different estimates of the extent to which production this year will exceed last year's level, Mr. Shonfield, who leans to the first report thinks it may be about double the estimate made in the second report, of under 4 per cent. If estimating production levels is difficult, financial forecasting is doubly so, as can be seen from the day by day variations of city column opinions. The City Editor of the Evening Standard (23-4-60) opened his column with the following:—

“Business" Calvin Coolidge once said, “will be either better or worse.” That’s the kind of helpful advice you could have collected by the bagful in the City this week.

But as a stock exchange operator once remarked, the secret of success for speculators does not consist in knowing what investors ought to do tomorrow if they were wise, but in knowing what foolish things they are likely to do.

World Wheat Surplus

In an article ‘‘Problem of World Wheat Surplus Still Unsolved” The Times (25-5-60) summarises the first annual review by the International Wheat Council of the world wheat situation. It confirms the Socialist argument that capitalist and political interests which determine the policies of producers and governments make it impossible to achieve a world policy based on human need. Capitalism requires that products must be sold and can normally be sold only to those who can afford to pay. Even when governments, for internal reasons, would like to give away surpluses, this is strenuously opposed by other exporting countries which see their markets endangered and price levels forced down.

In brief, many governments after the war stimulated wheat production because of the then food shortage, with the result that “in North and Central America average yields per acre have more than doubled since before the war, in South America they have increased by over 70 per cent, and in Oceania by almost one-half.” The governments continued the policy after the commercial need had disappeared, because, for political reasons, they wanted to help the farmers, but in the meantime consumption of wheat has been declining in the advanced countries.

The comment is that is is “impossible to avoid the conclusion that the situation giving rise to the accumulation of heavy surplus must now be accepted as a ‘deep-seated and persistent problem '." Yet all the time there are millions of people who desperately need more food but cannot afford to pay for it. The Financial Times (25-5-60) discussing the problem concludes that there is no solution except that of restricting output, if and when the governments can bring themselves to that politically unwelcome course.

Russian Oil

Along with the enormous over-development of oil production and refining and the laying up of large numbers of tankers, the oil firms now face the problem of a Russian drive to sell their surplus oil—at prices well below world levels. The Financial Times (30-4-60):

Last year Russia accounted for one-third of the total increase in world oil production, with output of crude, according to the latest issue of Petroleum Press Service, rising by 45m. tons to 129m. tons. Efforts have been made to increase exports, and last year about three-quarters of the 17m. tons exported outside the Soviet bloc went to Europe. Since then the sales drive has been extended, and some successes have been achieved in Japan and in Egypt. So far imports of Russian oil into the U.K. have been small being virtually confined to lubricating oil, but her salesmen are active and it is likely that further contracts may be announced before the end of the year.

Discussions have been in progress for expanding trade between Britain and Russia and the Russians are reported to have made this dependent on the admission of large quantities of Russian oil into the British market.

Edgar Hardcastle