News in Review: Quick look around (1965)

The News in Review column from the August 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quick look around

To those who find the headlines depressing, and who prefer to look for the news in the newspapers’ smaller columns (“Vicar, 73, Weds Secretary, 21”) we can offer little comfort.

Events which are considered of minor importance reflect the same drab image as the big news.

Nearly two million people are receiving National Assistance in this country, which shows that many more than two million are not sharing in whatever the Tories meant when they talked about our rising prosperity. About three quarters of those on National Assistance are pensioners, which shows again that although the shadow of want may have been lifted from some people (for example the judges who are soon going to get a twenty-five per cent rise in their already big wages) it still hangs over the retired worker.

We have been promised that the report of the government’s Study Group on the North West will shortly be published. The Group found that parts of the North West have the highest mortality rate in the country, due to the fact that so many of its people live in towns and cities, under squalid conditions. It also discovered a fact which some other people had known for a long time; that there are still plenty of slums in this country, and that they are increasing fast. The Group concluded, in fact, that it will take fifty years, at the present rates of clearance, to get rid of the North West’s slums.

In Geneva, United Nations Secretary General U Thant said that on present showing there will be more unemployment, more hunger, more malnutrition, in 1970 than there is today. “The misery of the developing world,” he said, “is a progressive misery. It threatens to grow worse in the second half of the decade.” The only comment to make here is that this gloomy opinion comes from someone who, with the job which he has, must obviously be one of the world’s top optimists.

There is no reason to hope that the news will get any better. It is apparent that there was something seriously lacking in the perceptive powers of the man who first said that every day, in every way, things are getting better and better.

Vietnam mission

It is fairly safe to assume that Mr. Wilson was not heedless of the political advantages to be gained from the publicity which was bound to accompany the suggested peace mission on Vietnam.

Perhaps it was even hoped that in the excitement few people would have realised that the mission had not actually done anything, or gone anywhere and that indeed most of its members had split up and gone home.

The mission was the same sort of empty gesture—like Chamberlain’s trip to Munich, like the Locarno Treaty in 1924 — which convince workers that capitalism’s leaders are about to solve the problem of war.

This conviction rests upon a delusion; that wars are caused by international statesmen omitting to talk before they start shooting—or rather, before they tell their workers to start shooting for them. (At one time there was a popular theory that Stalin’s intransigence could be dealt with by getting him to raise a Kremlin cricket team to play an XI from Westminster.)

In fact, there is no lack of opportunity for capitalism’s leaders to confer. And, as the Vietnam mission has shown, there are also plenty of informal channels through which they can communicate, even if they do not recognise each other’s existence. It is clear .that they fail to do so only when they think there are other ways of settling their differences.

It is also clear that wars are not caused by a failure of communication. They are caused by conditions which cannot be affected by any conference, and they start when further talking is pointless.

The Western powers are now trying to get the Vietcong to negotiate, when they are convinced that they are close to victory. This is something like Hitler trying to impose his terms on the Allies as his empire was collapsing in April 1945. Like any other war, the one in Vietnam has its own momentum of ruthlessness and it will be played out to its bitter end.

That will not be the end of the matter; Vietnam is only the latest of the small wars in the greater struggle between the world powers over which shall control and exploit South East Asia. There is no sense, no reason, no humanity, in such conflicts—and no “right” either on any side.

It is typical of Labour Party hypocrisy that they should pretend that normal human standards can be applied to the war in Vietnam. They are among the supporters of the social system which produces the war there and which could make it (to use the current ugly jargon) escalate into something which even Mr. Wilson does not pretend to be able to control.

Algerian conflict

During the long war for Algerian independence, the people who suffered in the nationalist cause were comforted by the thought that out of their tribulations freedom would be born in Algeria.

At that time, as the French forces were daily committing the most brutal of excesses, it was easy to represent the FLN as fighters for liberty.

One of the heroes of the rebellion, who quickly emerged as the effective ruler of Algeria after independence, was Ben Bella. He was supposed to be the man who, once the French had been banished, would lead the poor Algerian peasant to freedom and prosperity.

One of Ben Bella’s closest associates, the man who stood by him and did so much to help him root out opposition after the rebellion, was Colonel Boumedienne. If anyone bears a load of responsibility for selling Ben Bella as Freedom’s Messiah, it is Boumedienne.

Yet now, according to the Colonel, the whole thing was a mistake. Ben Bella does not stand for freedom—he is a despot, a demagogue. He squandered Algeria’s resources, he frightened off investors. (We should remind ourselves here that the Colonel, who has pledged himself to encourage investment in Algeria, calls himself a Socialist.)

It is too late, now, to discover that the Algerian rebellion was to result in replacing one despotism by another; it would have saved some lives if at the time Boumedienne had reminded his followers that nationalist risings often have that effect.

All nationalist movements claim that they are fighting for freedom, and not a few of them also claim to be Socialist as well. But when they get power, and the moment of truth arrives, they frequently impose dictatorships.

Algeria is only the latest of several countries in which this has happened recently, and in which the leaders of the rebellion, after they have won, have split and denounced each other as despots. In one after another of the new African states this has happened—sometimes until the imposition of a one-party state has silenced the opposition and left only one side to put over its point of view.

These are the fruits of nationalist rebellion. There can be few causes which have induced so many people to waste so much time, energy and blood.

Gaolbreak

One fact is often overlooked by the man-in-the-street advocate of the deterrent effect of heavy sentences. The more severe the sentence, the greater the incentive to escape.

Heavy sentences are often imposed on members of big and well-organised mobs like the Train Robbers, who are well enough equipped, in daring and organisation, to bring off a rescue from gaol.

The prison authorities are of course aware of this; if rumours are true they have thwarted plans to free two of the Train gang. But the criminals have the same sort of advantages as guerrilla fighters—they can move freely in the world outside, they can watch and wait and pounce when they think the moment has come.

The rescue of Ronald Biggs has confirmed what the escape of Charles Wilson showed—that big time crime is now refined and organised enough not to reject any job. Perhaps some criminals with a sense of humour might reflect that they at any rate are responding to the Labour government’s appeal for greater technical expertise in our work.

It has been often said that men like the Great Train Robbers would make excellent soldiers or big business men. It is apparent that they do have the required amount of ruthlessness to succeed in these fields.

At the moment, however, they prefer to rob people in ways which capitalism says are illegal, and to ignore other methods which are likely to bring them a place in the Honours List.

One thing the robbers fear above everything else, above imprisonment, above the nervous stress of their work, and that is to be a normal member of the working class. They cannot face the prospect of the daily journey to the factory or office, the clocking on and off, the monotonous routine jobs, the kowtowing to the boss, the leisure time spent in visiting or cutting the lawn.

This is one of the influences which persuade them to be criminals. It is also one of the influences which persuade the capitalist class to hang on to their privileged situation, and to the rights it brings them to be legalised robbers.

News in Review: What do they stand for? (1963)

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

What do they stand for?

It is obviously time for somebody to remind the nuclear disarmament movement what they are supposed to stand for.

Remember the days when, they only inscribed upon their banners slogans about banning the bomb? When they appealed that everyone, regardless of their political views, could co-operate in the appeal to save us from nuclear destruction? When they trotted out tame Tories (in much the same way as the Tories trot out tame trade unionists) to try to prove this point?

You do remember? Well, forget it.

The recent demonstrations organised by the Committee of 100 against bad housing, and against the Greek government, show that the unilateralists are going the same way as the other reformist organisations which have sprung up full of fire, have had their day and have vanished.

This process has followed a familiar, wearisome pattern. As unilateralism has failed to have any impact upon that great mass of working class votes which so faithfully support capitalism, the movement has found itself confronted with a choice.

It could have stuck to its original purpose and declined quickly into the ranks of the organisations whose objects may sound very desirable, but have no relevance to the needs of capitalism. Or like any other reformist group, it could have looked out for fresh fields to exploit.

This is what the unilateralists have done, which is not to say that their new preoccupation with issues like democracy in Greece will win them any more support than they gained from advocating banning the bomb. Here, once again, is evidence that, even on their own terms, reformist organisations are seldom logical.

It was not from any notion of superiority, nor any wish to detach ourselves from the problems of capitalism (if that were possible) that we said from the beginning that the nuclear disarmament movement would go the same way as the rest. We have seen so much of this in the past. There is no satisfaction now in seeing our forecast proved correct.

Because as each reformist movement rises and dies, it absorbs the energies and the enthusiasm of the very people who should be working for the new social order which will settle the things they fear and dislike once and for all.

Rachman, a scapegoat

As a scapegoat, Peter Rachman had just about everything. Fat. Balding. Property speculator. Keeping women. Just the man, in fact, to vent a little spleen on if you have been kicked out of your house or if you envy somebody else’s ability to buy feminine favours.

And a scapegoat Rachman has been made, not least by the Labour Party in their transparently clever attempt to win votes by using what they know of Rachman's affairs to attack the Rent Act.

So perhaps a word or two to put Rachman in his place will not come amiss.

First of all, it is nonsense to suggest that it was the Rent Act which gave Rachman his chance. As the papers have pointed out, the heavy glove boys operated against precisely the people who were still protected under the Act.

What Rachman did was to exploit the loopholes in the housing laws and to hide his transactions in a maze of legal complications. This is something which will happen, provided it is profitable, whether there is a Rent Act or not.

Capitalism has always been interested in the cost of housing, because working class rents can have an explosive effect upon wages and upon an election. The shady operator knows that it can often be very remunerative to probe for the weak spots in the law and when he has found them to exploit them to the full.

If Rachman had not cast his shadow in the field of properly speculation he may well have made his pile in some other way. Or indeed, if Rachman had never lived there would have been somebody else to do exactly the same sort of unsavoury deal.

In any case, was not Rachman, in a way, one of capitalism’s heroes? A penniless refugee who became a self-made man of riches? Who is to say that, if his gamble on the oilfields in the North had come off, he may not have become a nationally respected man, his racketeering days forgotten, and ended his life with a title?

Why not? It has happened before.

If the Rachman story is sordid, if it shows up a sort of human behaviour which is unpleasant, if it evokes some of the most regrettable of human reactions—it is only typical of capitalist society itself.

Criminal waste

The trains which, packed to suffocation, are pulling out of the big cities, and the roads to the coast wedged tight with traffic, tell us that holiday time is here and with it one of capitalism’s silly seasons.

High summer is the time when all sorts of fruit and salad is liable to be produced in such abundance that the price falls to the point when it becomes economical for the farmers to plough the stuff back into the ground or leave it rotting on the trees.

But now here is another, even sillier, example of the waste which the profit motive brings with it—one which need not happen only at the height of summer.

The Times of July 31st last reported that Cerebos Ltd., of Hartlepool, plans to dump a hundred tons of meat and fish paste into the sea because they are changing the shapes of their jars.

Hartlepool is in the stricken North-East; perhaps some of the unemployed up there would not say no to a few free jars of fish paste. Or perhaps the stuff might help out with some of the underfed children of the world.

Never mind. Presumably some accountant somewhere has worked out that it will be cheaper for Cerebos to sink the pastes. Just like any other company, they have to keep a close eye on their balance sheet.

Silly is too mild a word to describe the social system which not only allows the criminal waste of the world’s resources but actually, at times, requires and encourages it.

Mail Train robbery

The two-and-a-half million pound mail train robbery was audacious and glamorous enough to have come from the pen of the most imaginative crime fiction writer.

In that, it was typical of a recent strengthening trend in crime. The big, well planned robbery is becoming increasingly profitable for the crooks and so more and more of a headache for the police.

This is hardly surprising. The existence of private property elevates money into the key to a secure life. The moneyed man is always the privileged man and he does his best to make sure that he keeps both the money and the privileges.

There are plenty of such privileged— and honoured—men whose wealth has been amassed from the exploitation of the other class in society. Or perhaps they inherited it from their ancestors’ historical equivalent of the Cheddington hold-up.

This sort of wealth is respectable—it has come from what has been well called legal robbery, which conforms to capitalism's needs and so its moralities.

Robbery, forgery, embezzlement, and so on, do not conform and the men who try to get rich by practising them are anything but honoured.

Be that as it may, crime is inevitable as long as capitalism lasts; offences against property make up die overwhelming majority of crimes today. Capitalism without crime, in fact, is simply impossible.

Ironically, it is capitalism itself which asks for some of its crime. Do not the armed forces, so essential to capitalism, encourage just the sort of knowledge and the mental attitudes which are useful in a desperate, quick-fire robbery?

The driver of the Cheddington train said that one of the gang advised him to keep quiet because there were some “right bastards” there. Well, it is the “right bastard” who makes an excellent Commando or bomber pilot.

All of this is not to justify nor to condone the criminal. Indeed, any one who tried to take away from the Cheddington gang any of the money they have stolen would soon find that, in their own unmistakeable way, they are as firm in their support of property rights as any bank boardroom.

Capitalism is an unpleasant social system and crime is only one of its many excrescences.

Finance and Industry: The end of the publican (1963)

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

The end of the publican

Reference was made in these columns recently to the concentration of the brewing industry in a smaller number of large firms. According lo the Evening Standard (6/8/63) the process is continuing and taking new forms. One of these is that as the big firms find they can make more profit by having the public- houses run by their own paid managers, they are more and more getting rid of the houses run by tenants, as leases fall in. Some experts are forecasting a big fall in the number of publicans who run their own business, and those who remain are finding their freedom of action more restricted. Having been tied in respect of the brands of beer they could sell, they are now finding themselves limited in their choice of wines and spirits, and even cigarettes and mineral waters. The Evening Standard City Editor thinks that the big brewers, who launched their own brand of gin in opposition to the existing brands, will follow this up by producing their own brand of whisky.

He thinks the disappearance of the “free” publican a matter for regret and a positive danger, but does not explain how the all-round powerful drive concentration in industry and trade is to be halted. Governments may promise to turn back the clock by legislation, but capitalism has a habit of largely ignoring it. It was not only the Conservatives who said they were opposed to any form of monopoly, but there was a time when the Labour Party, too, wanted a large number of small capitalists in preference to a small number of large ones.

In any event it seems that the British worker to whom the Conservatives promised “full personal freedom and power of initiative” isn't going to be allowed to exercise it in his choice of pubs, beers, whisky, etc., quite apart from the limiting factor of his ability to pay.

Down with money

As a small by-product of the £2½ million train robbery the Daily Mail in its issue of August 10 had a full-length leader with the caption “Down with Money.” How bold and refreshing? Nothing of the kind: just the usual inanities of the newspaper editorial mind. The theme was that the robbers of the mail train would find it very exhausting trying to spend so much money and would soon discover that “ money is a nuisance and a bother.” So why not abolish it altogether!

After that daring promise of an idea came the flat triviality of the actual scheme: “Why do we not become a credit card nation, and free everyone from the necessity of carrying bulky pockets full of paper? ”

This, according to the leader writer, would save us all a lot of trouble. No money changing hands and being transported about or locked up in safes. Just Bank of England Computers giving everyone a statement each week of what they had spent and what they had left. All accounts would be settled by cheque. The writer conceded that we might still need a few metal discs for slot machines. “But for the rest let us just sign our names and give our numbers for everything from bus tickets to bingo games. ’ 

We may pause for a moment to contemplate the spectacle of millions of busy shoppers, and travellers signing their names and giving their numbers at shop counters, in buses, ticket offices, etc., and may well wonder whether they would consider it any less tedious than handing out notes and coin.

But there is a catch that the writer overlooked. His brain child all began with the £2½ million train haul and he closed on the note that “there would never again be another train robbery.” But if he thinks that as credit cards come in the opportunity for theft goes out he has overlooked not only the possibility of signing someone else's name and number but also of stealing or forging credit cards.

But let us invite the writer in the Mail to give his mind to a really bold and constructive idea. Let him ask himself why bullion, coins, notes, cheques and credit cards are in use at all; whose interest they serve; and whether they are really necessary?

The theoretical justification for the continuance of a monetary system is that it enables those who lawfully possess goods to sell them, and use the money to buy whatever they choose, when and where they choose. Seemingly a very admirable and convenient arrangement (even if it does get upset much and often by robberies). But it serves to mask the realities of production and distribution which from the point of view of the majority of the population are far from admirable. How do the lawful possessors of (the products of the factories, workshops, farms, and so on, come to be in that position? Because they have laboured to produce what they own and sell? Not at all. Just the opposite in fact. The one undeniable feature of the world we live in is that wage and salary earners who are employed to produce the goods are never the owners of them after production. The owners and the non-producers, simply by virtue of the fact that they are already the owners of the factories, either directly or as shareholders.

So the money arrangements are merely the cover for the legalised exploitation of the mass of the. population, serving primarily the interests of the owning class.

Of course, it needs boldness of thought to consider the fruitful possibility of all the people of the world simply producing what all need, and distributing it directly, without any monetary arrangements (and newspaper leader writers are notoriously timid, and fearful of thought) but having made a small start could not the leader writer of the Mail be induced persevere?

Wage restraint

Mr. Harold Wilson has shown candour in saying again, as he has said before, that any future Labour Government will count on the trade unions accepting wage restraint as part of a policy of restraint of profits, rents, etc. Amid some mild expressions of approval or disapproval, Mr. Hill, general secretary of the Boilermakers Society, got into the headlines by declaring his emphatic opposition to any form of wage restraint. So the battle commences: Hill versus Wilson. And how will the issue be settled? Shall we end with wage restraint or without wage restraint? The answer is that, so long as we have wages, the efforts by workers to push them up and by employers (backed by governments) to push them down will continue: nothing will be settled.

The trouble is that those who argue for and those who argue against wage restraint are not really arguing about whether it should exist or not, but only whether its existence should be admitted in words.

Take Mr. Hill, for example. If, correctly reported, he does not want any form of wage restraint and presumably thinks that if a declaration of “ no restraint” is made, the situation will be different. But, of course, it will be altered hardly at all. For years, indeed for generations, and long before a Labour Government invented the term “wage restraint” to describe its policy, there have been workers and trade unions which have demanded higher wages, and fought bitterly by strikes to get them: and have never got the wages they demanded and thought they ought to have. They have not been restrained by the words “ wage restraint,” but by the resistance of the employers and the power of the government—in the last resort, military power.

What has Mr. Hill to say about his own Union. He has never accepted wage restraint, but he has repeatedly had to accept the fact that his Union members could not get the wages they were asking for. What has Mr. Hill done about it? He has done what he could, but that did not include getting rid of the fact of wage restraint.

As remarked earlier, this is bound to last as long as the wages system lasts, and most people, including apparently Mr. Hill, unfortunately will not get round to recognising that the wages system could and should be got rid of along with the rest of capitalism.

The role of gold

In an address to the Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg recently, the President, Mr. P. H. Anderson, reviewed the prospects of gold mining in South Africa. He stated that in the last 15 years output has more than doubled. It reached a record of 25 million ounces in 1962, and the first five months of 1963 showed a further 10 per cent. increase, but with the exhaustion of mines and in spite of the development of new areas it may now have reached its peak. Employment in the mines has begun to fail from the 1961 peak of 40,000 Europeans and 400,000 Bantu.

The working profit from the gold mines in 1962 was £123 million with a further £21 million from uranium, and dividends of £55 million.

One of the factors stimulating gold production and profits was the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1949, and the South African gold interests have for years kept up incessant propaganda for a general devaluation of world currencies, including, above all, the American dollar. In spite of repeated assurances by the American government that they have no intention of doing this, Mr. Anderson states that a number of South African mines are continuing in operation, though making losses, in the hope that devaluation will sooner or later come to their aid.

As is the way with all vested interests looking for means to increase their own profits, the South African gold interests, backed by a number of economists, argue that it is in the interest of world trade in general, and in particular that it would help the “West” against “Communism,” meaning by the latter the Russian government.

One of the counter arguments from the United States has always been that revaluing the dollar from its present rate of 35 dollars to an ounce of gold to some higher figure (50 dollars is often mentioned in the propaganda) would help the Russian Government since Russian gold stocks would automatically be worth more dollars in the world market.

It has often been claimed that Russian gold production is only second to that of South Africa and rising rapidly (a figure of over 17 million ounces was claimed in 1958). But some of the gold experts outside Russia have been sceptical about Russian output and the size of its gold reserves.

“Lombard” in the Financial Times has recently mentioned various estimates of Russian output, but dismisses them all as no more than “ intelligent guesswork.” But, he claims, if total output and stocks of gold in Russia are not known, what is known is that since the early nineteen fifties Russian gold has been coming into the world market at the rate of something under 7 million ounces a year.

His conclusion is that this figure probably represents something approaching total output and that the supposed enormous gold reserves of the Russian government are mythical—unless the Russian government, like the South Africans, is also waiting for the day when the American government devalues the dollar in terms of gold.

For Socialists it has its own lessons. In spite of the nonsensical forecasts of some alleged experts that the devaluation of the Pound in 1932 would be the end of gold, it still plays its old role in capitalist international transactions, just as much for capitalist Russia as for the rest of the capitalist world.

Edgar Hardcastle