News in Review: Two classes (1963)

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

At Home

Two classes

We are still, the government anxiously assured the voters in the recent by-elections, living in the Age of Affluence. Very well. As the Conservatives promise that their new government will bring in a more vital, more prosperous Britain, as the Labour Party bid for our votes with a vision of this country as a vast test-tube, what is the latest from the poverty and riches front?

The Co-operative Permanent Building Society reported that half the people who buy homes through them earn less than twenty pounds a week and that a quarter earn less than sixteen pounds a week. Two-thirds of the houses bought through the Co-op. cost less than £3,000. Anyone who has lowered himself into the perilous pit of working class house ownership will appreciate what these figures mean in terms of size and quality of houses and of struggle to pay off the loan on them. House owners are supposed to be among the most affluent of the working class but the Co-op's report shows that none of them live in a castle and that buying a house relieves nobody of the usual working class battle to get by.

Housing of another sort cropped in one more of those conferences—this time of the National Housing and Town Planning Council. Dr. Eric M. Sigsworth, lecturer in economic history at the University of York, said that there will be three million unfit houses or slums in this country by 1973. Now this is after the promised speed up in slum clearance. Perhaps they would clear more if they slowed down?

Many workers think that the road out of poverty, bad housing and the like, is one of loyal obedience to their employer. Among other firms, the Ford Motor Company have encouraged this idea. They give silver and gold badges to the men who have done long service, and who have kept essential machinery going when there was a strike on. They also give these men certain staff and pension privileges. But Fords are now in the midst of another efficiency drive and what account does that take of loyalty? The drive has meant that four of the gold and silver badge men have been sent back to the factory floor, which means that they have been demoted and that they have lost their privileges. If they did not like the way the company was repaying their long service, the lour men could have accepted dismissal. Which must have caused some hard, rueful, thinking in the loyal heads of Dagenham.

Everything very normal, in other words, for the working class. Nothing changing, either, for their social betters. The will of Sir George Usher, an industrialist who died last October, showed that he was worth over £2 million at the end of his life. Each of his sons inherited over a million pounds which must have come from somebody's hard work, but not theirs.

The Finance Accounts for the United Kingdom 1962-3 showed that it is still a paying business to be a figurehead for British capitalism. Annuities paid to the Royal Family amounted to £166,000 during the year. Not bad for reading out speeches which somebody else has written for you, shaking hands and generally doing as you are told.

Will the household budgets of any readers of the Socialist Standard be affected by the increase in the fees of Eton? Anyway, it is instructive to hear about them and to ask whether every child really has the equal chance in education the politicians are always promising. Eton has gone up to £554 a year. If you can't run to that you can try for Harrow or Winchester (both £498) or Charterhouse (£492). Or there is always the local Council Primary, which costs a little less and has other differences besides.

Getting to know you

It is a common fallacy that a Minister who is familiar with the problems which his department has to deal with is able to solve them that much more easily. And, of course, it gives a boost to people's morale if a Minister appears in their midst, looks at their conditions and clicks his tongue in sympathy. They forget that when he gets back to Whitehall he is so often quite powerless to do anything about the conditions.

So it has come about that successive Ministers of Housing have always made an early tour of the worst of the slums as if looking at them would make the slums go away instead of increasing, as they in fact do. And so it was that Lord Hailsham (as he then was), when he was put in charge of the unemployment problem in the North East, went straight off to tour the area—cloth cap and all. But any personal experience which Hailsham might have gained about the North East was wasted, because Douglas-Home replaced him with Edward Heath.

Now Mr. Heath is supposed to be a very astute man. Did he, then, abandon the pretence about the usefulness of a personal appearance? One of his first appointments was to fly off to the North East to see for himself what unemployed men and their families, and idle shipyards and factories, look like.

Labour and the TSR2

One of the latest babies of British capitalism, proudly wheeled out by its doting parents, is the TSR-2.

This aircraft, it is claimed, can do almost anything by way of airborne destruction. In its ability to perform the most horrifying deeds, in the range of its destructive power, in its diabolical versatility, the TSR-2 is something like a precocious, delinquent child.

These horrors are going to cost something like a couple of million pounds each. Commenting on this, Mr. Denis Healey, the Labour M.P. (who put the cost at £20 million each), asked what this sum represented in terms of schools, hospitals, and so on. This is a common complaint, whenever the amount of money which capitalism spends upon weapons is discussed. Yet what do the Healeys expect? Capitalism has a list of priorities to which it allocates its resources and human comfort is not near the top of it. This was as true under the Labour government which Mr. Healey supported as under the Tory one which he attacks.

Indeed, Mr. Healey showed how small are the differences between his own party and the Tories on the issue of armaments when he went on to say that the TSR-2 is a waste of money, which could better be spent on military helicopters and other transport aircraft and on the Buccaneer, a naval strike ’plane which is already in service.

The best, then, that the Labour Party offers us on the matter of armaments policy is to look after the purse strings more carefully than the Conservatives have done. They will try to make sure that every penny the British ruling class spend on their weapons gets value for money.

And perhaps they will succeed. Perhaps, under Labour, there will be no more Blue Streak fiascos. British capitalism will still have fearfully destructive armaments, the waste of human knowledge and resources will go on, but it will all be presided over by a Labour M mister of Defence who will make sure that it is done at the market price and not a penny over. Does this encourage us to believe the hypocritical Labour claim to stand for peace and progress? It does not.

Abroad

Guiana must wait

It was by something like a slick trick that Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys brought the recent British Guiana constitutional conference, which was supposed to discuss ways of granting the colony independence, to a close.

The British government has rejected the idea of early independence for British Guiana. Instead, another conference will take place after fresh elections next year. The significant thing about the election is that they will be run on a proportional representation scheme which will probably break up the present party groupings. At the last elections the Peoples' Progressive Party, led by Doctor Jagan, got 43 per cent. of the votes, but 60 per cent. of the seats, while the opposition Peoples' National Congress, with 41.5 per cent. of the votes, got just over 36 per cent. of the seats.

This sort of result is common in the direct electoral system which British Guiana, and this country, has worked to. The fact that Mr. Sandys thinks that proportional representation is a good idea for British Guiana does not mean that he is thinking about advocating the same thing for Great Britain. The two big British parties do too well out of the present system for that.

The latest Sandys plan was, bluntly, a tongue-in-the-cheek trick lo impose Whitehall's own wishes upon British Guyana. Dr. Jagan described it as “ dastardly and unprincipled," which is just the expression which other people might have used about the Doctor's own action last year, when he called in British troops to suppress a rising in the colony.

In spite of Jagan's fulminating, the people of British Guiana seemed to have taken the news quietly. It would be good news indeed if this meant that they have come to understand that capitalism is full of diplomatic double-crossing and that in any case the Guianese working people have no more to hope for from independence than they had under British rule.

Sadly, this is unlikely at the present.

Jews in Russia

From the Soviet Union comes more indications of the recent trend there of persecution of the Jews.

The latest example comes in the October 20 edition of Izvestia which reports, and comments, upon the alleged crimes of a number of men but most prominently upon two called Shakerman and Roifman, both of whom are Jews.

These men are accused of embezzlement and bribery, of setting up a profitable racket in the produce of State factories and farms. The full story reminds us of the vast enterprise of Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22; they are said to nave been running a knitwear factory which embezzled machinery and with wool which they had diverted from collective farms. The produce, say the prosecution, was sold on the black market.

Izvestia is furious about these allegations, and raves that the men had amassed thirty million roubles in cash and a hundredweight of gold, diamonds and platinum. The paper has also assumed that the accused are guilty before their trial is complete.

Whether these men are criminals or not, there is mounting evidence of a campaign in Russia to use the Jews as scapegoats to excuse the country’s recent economic difficulties. This is a nasty subterfuge which has often been used in the past. Ignorant workers who are suffering the brunt of capitalism's problems are usually only too ready to blame some racial or religious minority for their troubles.

There need, then, be no surprise that this is happening in Russia. In any case, how is it that economic crimes arc possible in a country which is supposed to be Socialist? How can a country where everyone stands equally offer the chance for a criminal to amass enormous wealth while the rest of the people suffer hunger and other hardships? How can a society where wealth is owned in common have any sort of a market, black or white?

It is impossible to answer these questions, and to explain anti-Semitism in Russia, unless we face the facts. The Soviet Union is not a Socialist country—even supposing that such a thing as Socialism in one country were possible. It is a capitalist country and one where precious little democracy exists at that.

When we have got that straight, every thing else about the USSR falls neatly into place.

Business

Investment, profit, wages

The big mergers in Top Industry continue. Imperial Chemical Industries, who last May put up £10 million with Courtaulds to finance the acquisition of Tootal, have now lashed out another £13 million on Viyella International Ltd. Viyella have interests in spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing.

Viyella were not planning on any big capital investment in the near future but will obviously be able to use ICI’s money. ICI are probably interested in Viyella’s use of synthetic fibres, which now account for about half of its business. Industry is always seeking for ways of safeguarding its interests, but capitalism upsets its plans. Even a giant like ICI is no exception to this.

J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., the teashop firm, is another in the merger field. Its latest venture is in frozen food, the home market for which is estimated to be worth about 72 million a year.

Lyons are tying up their frozen food branch (Frood) with that of Associated Fisheries (Eskimo) and Union International (Fropax). This merger, it is hoped, will result in a combine which will initially command 16 per cent. of the market.

The move is presumably aimed against Unilever’s Birds Eye group, which at present claims two-thirds of the British retail market.

Capitalism is described, by its defenders. as an efficient social system. Yet it would be dillicult for them to find anything efficient or beneficial in the waste of the continual war which rival companies must carry on against each other over the carve up of a market.

The object of it all is, of course, bigger and bigger profits. A company which has succeeded in this past many expectations is Marks and Spencers, which since the war has been transformed from a rather dull chain store group into a bright, hard selling, and very profitable, concern. The very epitome, with its staff welfare schemes and its split second, split penny operation, of a “progressive’’ capitalist company.

The sales of M&S rose to £95.5 millions in the six months up to September this year. This was a record and with the Christmas rush to come, sales are expected to reach £200 million for the year —for the first time in the company’s history. To mark the occasion, shareholders got an extra 1¼ per cent, on their interim dividend.

And what about the people who make these sales, and mergers, and profits, possible? What do they get out of it? The wages of the working class are a constant worry to their employers, for the simple reason that higher wages mean lower profits, and vice versa.

That is why governments are always trying to control wages. Usually this control is described by a smooth phrase which is meant to persuade the workers that their wages are not being held down, and that nobody is trying to do so. Some industrialists, although they recognise their need for wage restraint, think that it should be done more subtly than has been the case in the past. This is what Lord Robens, Chairman of the National Coal Board, said on the subject when he spoke at last month’s Annual Conference of the Institute of Directors:

Whether we like it or not, the most sensitive spot in all our industrial relations is the size of Friday’s pay packet. That is why I deplore the continual use since the war of such phrases as "wage restraint,” "wage freeze,” and "pay pause" . . . .

A national productivity drive hasn't a hope of success if it is accompanied by phrases like that.

Their very sound puts a chill down a workman’s spine and they merely create ill-feeling and bitterness between management and men . . . 

Some sort of "guiding light” is essential if we are to rationalise the present chaos of wages settlement.

Inevitably, we must ask whether Lord Robens, when he was an M.P. supporting the 1945-51 Labour government—and later a member of that government—ever expressed so freely his dislike of the term ‘‘wage freeze”. He had plenty of chances too; it was the Labour government which invented it. Presumably, in the days when the Labour government was fighting to check wages, and using every euphemism in the book to do so, Alf Robens preferred to hold his peace.

Blogger's Note:

The aforementioned novel, Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, was reviewed in the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard by 'Ivan' (Ralph Critchfield).

‘Defence diplomacy’ (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Christmas Eve the Ministry of ‘Defence’ announced that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Trent, would be deployed to Guyana in South America. Sky News described the ship as one used for ‘defence diplomacy’ (tinyurl.com/cysxnpyf).

What, then, was the diplomacy that required the deployment of a gunboat in support? The one-word answer is ‘oil’. The Harvard International Review (27 September) noted:

‘In 2015, the oil giant Exxon Mobil discovered 11 billion barrels of oil off the coast of the small Latin American country. The discovery promises to change Guyana forever, catapulting the country and its people to new heights of power and wealth. Oil already generates US$1 billion in revenues annually for the government and will produce an estimated US$7.5 billion by 2040. By these forecasts, Guyana—the impoverished, rainforest-covered country of just 800,000 people—will become the fourth largest offshore oil producer in the world.’

The discovery was off the coast of a part of Guyana which has been the object of a territorial dispute with its neighbour, Venezuela, since the middle of the 19th century when Guyana was part of the British Empire. In 1899 an international court of arbitration awarded the disputed area to Britain. It’s an area comprising some 75 percent of present-day Guyana. Venezuela never accepted the decision, alleging that it was rigged, but didn’t insist too much in pursuing its claim until now.

On 3 December the Venezuelan government, under Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, held a referendum throughout the country about whether or not to reject the 1899 ruling and to incorporate the area as a new province. The result was a huge majority for, but on a low turnout, and the government duly established the new province, on paper.

Venezuela, much as it would like to acquire control of the new oilfield, is unlikely to try to actually annex the disputed area. The referendum had more to do with the presidential elections later this year and as a way of trying to win votes for Maduro by beating the nationalist drum. In any event, it is not the land, mainly tropical forest with a few gold mines, that Venezuela really would like so much as the territorial waters off the area’s coast where the oil is. Diplomatic talks have begun, with the US and Britain backing Guyana. Hence the dispatch of the Royal Navy warship to carry out its role in ‘defence diplomacy’.

Diplomacy is not a matter of working out what is the fair solution to a dispute between states. An important factor affecting the outcome is the relative strength of the two sides. In relations between states might is right. Venezuela may be stronger than Guyana and so could seize the land it claims. But Guyana is backed by the US and Britain, because they don’t want a state with a nationalist anti-American government to control the new oilfield (they want a friendly state to) or to extend its territory (in fact they have been working to overthrow the government there), and Venezuela is in no position to take them on any more than it was to challenge the British Empire in 1899.

The cannons roar

In another part of the world another Royal Navy warship, HMS Diamond, has also been engaged in ‘defence diplomacy,’ in the Red Sea. In fact it actually used its weapons. As the Royal Navy’s website boasted on 19 December:

‘Diamond’s actions in the small hours of Saturday morning is the first time a Type 45’s Sea Viper missile has been used in action and the first such shootdown by the Royal Navy since the 1990-91 Gulf War’.

The British Minister of War, Grant Schapps, later threatened more ‘direct action’ than shooting down a few drones (Daily Telegraph, 1 January). On 11 January Britain carried out this threat by joining the US by bombing Yemen, escalating the war in the region.

What is going on in the Red Sea is an aspect of the question of who controls the Persian Gulf, its oilfields and the trade route out of it. In 1980 President Carter laid down the Carter Doctrine that: ‘Gulf oil reserves were of vital interest to the US and the US would therefore be justified in preventing outside domination of the region by military intervention’. This was invoked against Iraq in 1991 and in 2003. Now the threat is from Iran, with the US relying on Israel to counter this. Indeed Israel has already bombed Iran on a number of occasions.

Israel is currently engaged in a war of revenge against the Hamas administration in Gaza. The West supports this because Hamas is an enemy of Israel, its asset in the region, only cynically advising Israel not too kill too many Gazans.

Iran and its allies and proxies see the Gaza war as a chance to weaken Israel as the West’s asset. The pro-Iran government of Yemen has been attacking ships bound for Israel or owned by Israeli capitalists. This has led major shipping companies to re-route their ships round Africa, with serious consequences for international trade.

As the Royal Navy’s website explained:

‘An estimated 23,000 merchant vessels pass through the Bab-al-Mandeb choke point – with Suez the gateway to the Middle East and beyond for shipping from Europe… and for Europe from shipping from the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. Vice-Admiral Brad Cooper, the US officer commanding the Combined Maritime Forces from their headquarters in Bahrain, underlined that safe passage of the Red Sea was “crucial for the world economy”. He continued: “More than 10% of global trade transits the waters anchored by two globally strategic waterways – the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandeb. Regionally, it has even greater impact, channelling trade across more than half the globe, ranging from Europe to Asia.”’

HMS Diamond’s commanding officer was quoted as saying: ‘The Royal Navy has always been committed to the protection of maritime trade’. By force if necessary. In this case in the context of the wider conflict of economic interest in the Middle East between the West and Iran over who controls oil in the Gulf and the trade route out of it.

Adam Buick

Running Commentary: Not cricket (1981)

The Running Commentary column from the April 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Not Cricket

Life as a working-class “non-white” in South Africa is an especially abject experience. We say working-class because many wealthy members of the capitalist class who would otherwise be regarded as “non-white”, notably Japanese industrialists. have enjoyed all of the privileges of accommodation, travel and services usually reserved for “whites”. Here the white African capitalist’s thirst for profits from Japanese trade overrides his racialist prejudices.

The lot of the propertyless black in South Africa is to be treated as subhuman, herded in ghettoes and camps, segregated in squalor from whites in every walk of life and relentlessly harried by the forces of the state. A “white” wanting to return a book to a public library, for instance, will probably have to comply with a rule requiring the book to be enclosed in a polythene bag if it is taken back by a black servant.

Against this backdrop it was understandable that the English Test cricketer Robin Jackman was recently ordered out of Guyana because of his links with South Africa. But as this issue developed and the Test match against the West Indies was disrupted, various contradictions were exposed.

In the Summer of 1980 assorted spokesmen and parrots of the “right-wing” (although some Liberals and Labourites were also vocal on this matter) insisted that British athletes should boycott the Olympic Games as a protest against the oppressive regime in the USSR. The policy of the politicians then was to try and use sport as a political medium. Yet a few months later many of these same politicians and their dutiful echoes are sounding the “keep politics out of sport” slogan. The fact is that the politicians have not suddenly changed the principle on which they seek to act from “Use politics in Sport” to “Keep politics out of Sport” as neither of these mottos was ever really their concern. It is economic considerations (and that doesn’t mean yours or mine) which are the reality behind government policymaking in the profit-system. Whereas the Russian Empire and its expansion pose a serious threat to the interests of the British owning class, no such fear is generated by trouble in the West Indies. On the contrary, they have the prospect of continued substantial trading. Looked at like this, it becomes clear why many of the spokesmen for British capitalism could welcome political hostility in sport at the Games and oppose any political disruption to the Second Test match against the West Indies.

Needless to say, governments of several of the West Indian countries, notably Jamaica and Antigua, allowed the Tests to go ahead on their territories to generate some cash for their flagging tourist trades, rather than exclude supporters of apartheid and jeopardise the series. It is not only the white South African leaders who demote principles below the pressure for profits.

Not Cronkite

Walter Cronkite of CBS television was much beloved by many Americans as — in the words of one newspaper — “something between the national flag and God”. Applauded by many at the time of Vietnam for his view that America should withdraw from the war, his recent retirement as a newscaster brought high praises from all and sundry.

Every evening he would enter the homes of millions of American workers to avuncularly present them with a careful selection of reports written unwaveringly from the viewpoint of the owning class. While the working class in America was wrestling with all of the problems of capitalism — inflation, inadequate housing, poverty and insecurity — old Walt would insist on spinning out the old yarns. Every broadcast was impregnated with false assumptions: all American people have a common interest; the protection of property benefits all equally; anyone can become a capitalist if he or she has the talent and initiative; the working class will always have to follow leaders; communism exists in Russia; and if the political ideas of economic equality were given any chance then all mayhem would break loose and Americans would be eating each other alive on the sidewalks.

Did Walt ever open up a bulletin with the news that Americans in employment were being paid less in the form of a wage or a salary than the value of what they had produced? Did he ever report that the wars are the logical outcome of the continuous struggles over trade routes, markets and territories by financiers, industrialists and land owners? Did trusty Walter ever point out that with advanced technology and abundant natural resources there is no need for a third of the world to go hungry? Sadly Walt never uttered a syllable on these points; he dealt only with items neatly processed for general consumption, images and distorted facts designed to maintain the status quo, the string of silent assumptions which riddle every thoughtfully chosen news item.

Gary Jay

News in Review: Arms Race (1962)

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

Arms Race

In the arms race, it's still flat out.

Colonel Glenn got the full ticker tape treatment for bravely proving that the United States is well up in space.

Nobody thought of giving a similar celebration for President Kennedy's announcement that the Americans were to resume nuclear tests to keep themselves well up in bombs.

The Russians claimed that they had solved the problem of the anti-missile missile. It did not take one newspaper long to latch onto the fact that the next step was the ant-anti-missile-missile.

Perhaps the Russians were exaggerating a little. But it is certain that they are working on those lines, and so are the Americans. One day the problems will be solved, the anti-missile missile will appear and will start the race to find a weapon to overcome it.

All of this knocks a big hole in the argument for the deterrent. No great power is ever deterred by the threat of its opponent having superior weapons. It simply sets to work to find an answer to them, or to make a better weapon for itself.

The old, forgotten, puny A-bomb was supposed to be a deterrent. Yet it has led directly to the massive weapons of today. Last month The Guardian was speculating on the chances of Russia making a 500 Megaton Bomb, only one of which could devastate the whole of this country.

Rockets, too, are supposed to be part of the great deterrent. But the Russians and the Americans do not seem to put each other off in their grim struggle to produce a more powerful, more accurate missile.

It would be a grand world if courageous adventure and scientific knowledge were wholly applied to man’s benefit. At the moment, they seem to be more concerned with knocking him about.

Labour and the Common Market

There's nothing like knowing your own mind, is there?

The Labour Party are one of the two great political parties of British capitalism.

And one of the great problems which the British capitalist class have to face is the European Common Market— whether to join and, if they do go in, whether they can do so on terms which are favourable to them.

So it is reasonable to expect that Labour would have some sort of policy on the Common Market. After all, by this time next year they might be in power and it would be a pretty kettle of fish for British capitalism to have a government which had no policy on so important an issue.

But a policy, in fact, is what the Labour Party have not. Some of their individual members are in favour of E.E.C.; others are just as strongly opposed. These two groups threatened an open clash last month, when thirty-one pro-Common Marketeers put down a motion on the House of Commons order paper.

This put the Labour leadership in a sticky spot. When they are unable to hide their differences—as in the case of nuclear weapons—they put the best face they can on it by posing as a virile party which encourages the expression of strong opinions.

But they prefer to hide their splits, even if this means them all agreeing on a watery and pointless compromise.

This is what happened over the Common Market. Mr. Brown and Mr Gaitskell persuaded both sides to settle for a motion which would somehow bridge the gap between them.

Thus the Labour Party avoided an open battle. Thus they also avoided giving the impression that they officially know their own minds on an important bone of capitalist contention.

And these are the practical planners of capitalism! No wonder they find the path to Westminster a hard and stony way.

British Guiana

Drearily familiar now is the news that another leader of an ex-colony, who himself suffered in gaol for his nationalist activities, is getting rough with his opponents.

The latest example of this is in Dr. Cheddi Jagan, prime minister of British Guiana. Dr. Jagan was imprisoned, and saw his young government overthrown, nearly ten years ago when the Colonial Office did not approve of the preference expressed by the Guianese electors.

This should have made Dr. Jagan an enemy of the British ruling class. Only last December he complained to the United Nations that his country was groaning under British oppression and added “. . . only the armed might of Britain acts as a deterrent to my country proclaiming its freedom."

So what did the doctor do when a couple of months later his subjects exercised their freedom to protest against, among other things, the austerity measures in his latest Budget?

There are no prizes for the correct answer. He called in the armed might of Britain, to deter the demonstrators and to help keep his government in power.

Did this shock the colonial freedom supporters, who in their muddled way like to think of the Jagans of the world as downtrodden democrats? They have no right to be surprised; it has happened often enough to condition them to any shocks.

It is one thing for a politician to express high principles when he is out of power. But principles must be forgotten when he is the man trying to control capitalism’s waywardness.

Even if it means a Jagan, who came to power on the poverty-stricken backs of the Guianese workers, imposing more austere conditions upon those workers. Even it if means a Jagan appealing for troops from the hated colonial oppressor to put his workers down.

At any rate, Dr. Jagan has obviously learnt a lesson in capitalist politics. Can we say the same for the colonial freedom supporters?

Northern Rhodesia

The British Government appears to have inclined ever so slightly before the wind of change over Northern Rhodesia.

The latest proposals on the electoral constitution for the territory stirred up u lot of fuss. Welensky was not the only one to get hot under the collar about them; there was plenty of newspaper talk of big splits in the Cabinet and possible resignations at the Top.

All this because one set of complicated electoral arithmetic which meant that the Africans could almost certainly not have won an election were replaced by another, equally complicated, set which meant that they might win.

So far nobody who matters in such things has suggested that the best way, for people who profess to be democrats, is to allow one vote to each elector and to run free elections.

Welensky has probably tried his hardest to browbeat the British government over Northern Rhodesia. He does not seem to have the coolest head amongst capitalism’s politicians, so perhaps he meant his threat to use force to keep the Rhodesian Federation in being.

This could mean another Algeria. Welensky must know that the war against the F.L.N. has so far a death roll which is larger than all the white people in Rhodesia.

If the Rhodesian whites do start a war. there will be a grim coincidence in it. For the blood will begin to flow in Rhodesia just as the Algerian war is coming to an end.

So it is that property rights and interests continually provoke war and misery.

There is a point there for the whites who are trying to hang onto their power and their copper in Rhodesia, for the Africans who want power to develop their own capitalist set-up there and for those who support capitalism all over the world.

Powers’ Return

The release of Captain Powers, the U-2 pilot, threw up some absorbing stories about the panic which hit Washington when they realised that something had gone wrong with their spy-plane.

But panic cannot itself explain the many contradictory statements which the American government put out before they were finally forced to admit the truth of the matter.

They lied as far as they were able and only gave out the facts when the Russians blew the lid off by producing Powers alive and very much in one piece.

In the case of Colonel Abel, who was exchanged for Powers, the Russians showed a much tougher front. They officially ignored his case and have never been trapped into admitting that he— or anybody else, for that matter—was one of their spies.

This is at least consistent with the whole dirty set up of international espionage. Capitalism must have its spies, of one sort or another, because it is divided into opposing blocs who must have and try to hold their economic and military secrets. It is, therefore, worse than humbug to wax indignant about the other side’s spies while making heroes of your own.

Capitalism cannot be a free, democratic social system. Neither (for those who are interested in such concepts) can it be a truthful system.

We should remember this, if ever the cold war hots up and both sides claim to be fighting for any number of high ideals. Ideals like Democracy and Truth. Spelt with capitals, please.

Nonsense about Race

The latest piece of nonsense to come from race-obsessed South Africa is the news that there has been an official ruling that the Japanese are to be classified as white.

Looking for the base economic motive that is usually to be found lurking behind the high-sounding racial twaddle, we find that the South African government is very anxious just now to encourage trade with Japan. Naturally, it would not do to make the Japanese suffer all the indignities which are the common lot of the black part of the population. A Japanese businessman thrown out of a hotel reserved for whites or pushed into the dingy part of a post-office to wait his turn with the downtrodden blacks might cancel his order for South African wool!

As so often happens with this racial nonsense, the perpetrators find themselves getting more and more involved in their own idiocies. On this occasion it appears that the locals find it hard in practice to distinguish between the Japanese and the Chinese. Since the Chinese are officially labelled as non-white, the Japanese are still being insulted since they are continually being mistaken for Chinese.

The whole affair has become all the more absurd because South Africa is now very keen on developing trade with China and is having to consider classifying the Chinese also as white.

All this absurdity brings back to mind the similar racial foolishness perpetrated by the Nazis before the war, in which again the Japanese were concerned. Readers may remember it.

On that occasion the Nazis were in close alliance with the Japanese and were hard put to fit this awkward fact into their half-baked theories on race. Finally. some bright theoretician came round with the suggestion that the Japanese were actually possessed of "Teutonic souls in non-Teutonic bodies" and the circle was squared.

The South Africans have evidently not forgotten this infamous piece of Nazi trickery. It speaks volumes on the depths to which they have descended in their efforts to maintain the myth of white supremacy.

News in Review: South African martyr (1966)

The  News in Review from the June 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

South African martyr

Mr. Abram Fischer, who was sentenced last month to life imprisonment on charges of conspiracy to commit sabotage and of being a member of the Communist Party, is the latest of South Africa's martyrs.

The South African Government have been gunning for Mr. Fischer for a long time. He defended Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu at the Rivonia trial in 1964 and, having broken his bail, has been on the run for over a year.

Now that the evil dictatorship has caught up with him he is likely to spend the rest of his life in gaol, for there is no remission in South Africa for political sentences.

Mr. Fischer made no secret of his membership of the Communist Party and gave his reasons at his trial:

  . . . one is the glaring injustice which exists and has existed for a long time in South African society, the other, a gradual realisation . . . that it was always members of the Communist Party who seemed prepared, regardless of cost, to sacrifice most; to give of their best, to face the greatest dangers in the struggle against poverty and discrimination.

While it is true that in South Africa the Communist Party opposes apartheid—and suffers for it—it is impossible to think that Mr. Fischer does not realise that countries which are under Communist rule are in many ways similar to Dr. Verwoerd’s dictatorship.

These countries also suppress opposition. They also stage trumped-up trials under repressive laws. They also imprison and execute political opponents.

There is strong evidence of the existence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Sharpeville was a horrible affair, but there have been similar outrages in, for example, East Berlin and Budapest.

Dictatorship and racism are features of capitalist society. They cannot be removed by joining one capitalist party in preference to another.

Abram Fischer has proved his courage and his sincerity, but we cannot ignore the fact that he is a tragically misguided man.

Gromyko in the Vatican

Another visible sign of the Soviet Union’s edging closer to the West was Mr. Gromyko’s visit to the Pope at the end of April.

This was the first-ever official meeting between the Kremlin and the Vatican. To mark the event the Pope gave Mr. Gromyko two Russian copies of the Schema de Ecclesia, which sets out the constitution of the Roman Catholic Church.

Perhaps he will need it. Russia’s split from China grows ever wider, which probably means that in the near future Moscow will be exploring more and more ways of making contact with opinion in the West.

This is a typical development in capitalism’s mighty international power game.

In the process of this development—and again this is typical—statesmen on both sides will have to forget a lot of what they said in the past. The Soviet Government and the Roman Catholic Church will have to forget that they were once hostile to each other.

All over the world Communist Parties will have to forget the days when they said, with Karl Marx, that religion was the opiate of the people.

They have, in fact, always been ready to compromise on this issue; there has never been anything to prevent a Christian joining the Communist Party.

Only last March the Communist Party in this country were protesting at religious attacks on them on television, which, they said, “. . . can only have the object of dissuading Christians from voting Communist."

If the Kremlin and the Vatican become bedmates, we may be sure the sheets will have been well aired for them by their faithful acolytes all over the world.


Getting away from it all

How would you like to get away from it all? How would you like to escape from the worry, and scurry of everyday living and spend some time in blissful solitude?

One way of doing this is to imitate Mr. Leonard Matchan, who recently bought the island of Brechou, in the Channel Islands. “For me,” he said, “It is going to be a means of getting away from the maddening crowd.”

The one big difficulty about this method is that it is rather expensive. Mr. Matchan, who is chairman of Cope Allman International, paid about £80,000 for his hideaway.

There is a cheaper way of getting solitude—one that is familiar to a lot of people.

In Leeds, for example, the police last year investigated 166 calls from people who were worried about old neighbours whom they had not seen or heard of for some days.

Forty-eight of these old people were ill or injured and needed help. One hundred and one of them had died— silent, lonely, unwanted.

So you see there are two ways of getting away from it all. One costs you a lot of money. The other costs you a lifetime of servitude and poverty as a member of the working class.

We are often told by well-kept politicians that we now live in a classless, affluent society.

The next time we hear that let us remember Mr. Matchan and his costly, tranquil island and let us contrast this with all those friendless deaths in the troublous city.

Independence for Guyana

British Guiana, after a long and sometimes bloody struggle, is the latest colony to gain its independence from British rule.

The people there were promised a great deal about the supposed benefits of independence and, if they believed what their nationalist politicians told them, are now probably expecting some of these benefits to be coming their way.

They are obviously going to be disappointed.

In a speech on 8th May last the Prime Minister of Guyana, Mr. Forbes Burnham, summed up what independence will mean when he asked the people to sleep less (for six hours a day, he said), eat less and work more. His Government’s motto for progress will be “Work and harder work.”

Mr. Burnham also attacked what he called the “disgusting habit” which Guyanese workmen have of stopping work to shelter from the sun and the rain.

This is all reminiscent of the English Methodist protest, in 1764, that a theatre in Bristol would be “. . . peculiary hurtful to a trading city . . . and directly opposite to the spirit of industry and close application to business.”

In more ways than one, the emergent nations resemble England in the 18th century. If Guyana is to make its independent way in the world of capitalism its people will have to lose some of their leisurely habits.

Their lives will become more organised, more alienated and faster. They will be more intensely, more scientifically exploited. They will become, in other words, members of a modern working class.

In the name of freedom and progress they will have cast off one type of slavery and substituted another.

China's bomb

Good news for all lovers of militarism and destruction was that China detonated her third nuclear bomb—it may even have been a hydrogen one.

Good news, also, for all lovers of the distortion of words was that this latest test was described by Peking as "a great victory for the party’s general line of Socialist construction.”

Good news for all connoisseurs of hypocrisy was that the State Department condemned the test because of its effect on the atmosphere—as if the United States had never exploded nuclear weapons in the air, and as if they are not continuing to test the things underground.

The Chinese bomb is yet another lap in the desperate nuclear arms race which has been in progress since Hiroshima. As each new country joins the race it justifies its presence with lies about its concern for peace and world security.

And the countries who are already in the race always “deplore” and “condemn” and murmur about having a disarmament conference somewhere, sometime—because they are concerned about any threat to their dominant standing in the world.

China is a rising capitalist power, and she has paid for her entry in the race in the coin which all the others have used and which is the only one universally recognised—force.

If it were not so terrifying it would be laughable that this onward march to destruction should be called Socialism. We live now in a society of madness, in which the very words we use often lose all sense and meaning.

Happily, there is one band who work determinedly to keep the word Socialism sane and clean, and who will not have it confused with the terrorism and hypocrisy of capitalism.

Poor men in their castles

Who has not heard the lament, from mortgage-burdened worker or from high-climbing local politician, about the alleged opulence of the council house tenant? Wallowing in the luxury of a subsidised rent, polishing the Jaguar at the door, the man in the council house takes it easy while the rest are stripped bare to pay for it all.

Recently, however, The Sun gave a glimpse at another side of this popular story. In Leicester many workers have refused the offer of accommodation on a new £2 million estate because the rents are too high for them. These rents range from £4 18s. 0d. for a one-bedroom flat to £6 12s. 0d. for a three- bedroom house.

“It's fantastic,” said the chairman of the city’s housing committee. “This is one of the wealthiest cities in Europe with good wages and full employment.”

But this does not mean that Leicester’s workers are wealthy, nor that they do not suffer the poverty that their mortgaged brothers know too well.

In Paris a similar story. There, Government Social Security officials have found that families who have moved recently into new skyscraper blocks of flats are by no means living high. The new-found fascinations of a bathroom have led to heavy fuel bills to pay for a flood of baths.

This was bad enough, but even worse was the revelation that of two thousand women living in the fiats about one thousand were trying to pay the higher rents by putting in a bit of prostitution on the side.

The amenities of the skyscrapers may have cleansed a few Parisian bodies, but the difficulty of paying for them has stained some morals.