Capitalism and the Comet (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.—The Hollow Men.

T.S. Eliot, it seems, was wrong. Dr Steel, an expert on asteroids and leader of the world's largest team involved in sighting new pieces of celestial debris, recently informed the second Australian Space Development Conference that Comet Smith- Tuttle, first sighted in 1862 and rediscovered in September 1992, is on course to collide with the planet Earth on 14 August 2116.

Comet Smith-Tuttle is a 3.1-mile-wide ball of rock and ice travelling through space at a speed of 37 miles per second. The comet’s collision with the Earth will create an impact force of 20 million megatonnes, or about 1.6 million times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A head-on crash could destroy up to 95 percent of humanity.

With the plot of a thousand sci-fi novellas becoming fact, is any action likely to be immediately instigated to safeguard the future of our children's children’s children? Having been given one hundred and twenty four years’ notice of this impending event, do we agree with Samuel Johnson that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”? Or, is it pointless to concern ourselves with something which will not directly affect a single person alive today?

Putting one in mind of Sir Boyle Roche who asked "what has posterity done for us?’’, the leader column in the Times (26 October) takes a very facetious view of the whole affair. Whilst contemplating the effect of Comet Smith-Tuttle’s arrival upon the stock market and property prices in 2116, the paper concludes that placid contemplation of the world’s fate has always worked up to now. The Times is, however, surprised at the prospect of civilization being brought to and end by a comet. It shares the existing belief that Armageddon is likely to occur through man-made pollution or nuclear war.

Should we placidly accept that the present world-wide system of society— capitalism—will still exist in the twenty-second century? Will the natural competitive elements of a system dedicated to the exploitation of the planet’s resources for financial gain, and to the economic exploitation of the majority of people living on the planet, be suspended whilst global co-operation is exercised in finding some way of averting the threat to ruling class and working class alike?

The odds of a head-on collision with Comet Smith-Tuttle are calculated at 400 to 1. The odds on the world being destroyed by an “internal’’ agency rather than an external one must be considerably shorter. Contemplate the effect of another hundred years of a social system based upon production for profit, not need. A system where political and economic control rests with a small minority. A system where the majority are forced to sell their mental and physical labour power to that minority in order to live. A system where the increasing wealth created by the majority is appropriated by the minority.

Threat from down here
Although no-one now living aged one hundred years has ever experienced the effects of a major collision with the Earth of an extraterrestrial object, they would certainly have experienced several times over the effect of a capitalist crisis of over-production. The same edition of the Times that carried the report of Comet Smith-Tuttle. carried stories with a more contemporary significance. We learn that George Soros, an Hungarian-American financier made £589 million profit from Sterling speculation during ‘‘Black Wednesday”. There are reports covering the march through London of 200,000 workers in support of the redundant miners.

The protests and demonstrations by workers against the effect of yet another capitalist crisis of over-production are understandable but misplaced. Instead of agitating for a fair day's pay for a fair day’s work the working class should be engaged in political action with the object of abolishing the wages system completely. It must be obvious that the bumblings and blusterings of hypocritical politicians and “labour leaders’’ can no longer disguise the fact that they arc powerless to influence the actions of the market system.

Capitalism has run its course. The only question is how much longer the working class are prepared to see capitalism thrash about continuing to do untold harm to millions of workers. The working class has a choice. It can continue to choose to support a social system which brainwashes them, which bullies them, which suppresses them, which makes them homeless, which makes them hungry, which makes them poor, which exploits them and which kills them. Or the working class can choose to realize that we are many and they are few. It can choose to stop its own exploitation and decide to hasten the demise of capitalism and bring about a social system based upon common ownership of the means of production and distribution. The working class can choose to abolish poverty, abolish famine, abolish want, abolish lack of opportunity, abolish the wages system. abolish capitalism.

Without an understanding of the present social system and a desire to bring about the social changes needed if we are all to have a future, simply rioting in the streets will not bring about the social revolution required to implement real global cooperation. After bringing about, and winning, that revolution, the task of preventing a comet from colliding with, and destroying the world must surely be a simple task for a world which by then has known many years of working together to clear up the mess left by capitalism.

There is evidence that the dinosaurs, rulers of the Earth in their time, were made extinct when an asteroid collided with the Earth sixty-five million years ago. We are not dinosaurs, but the social system has become one. It needs to be made extinct. Human beings are the most highly evolved species which has ever inhabited this planet. It seems ludicrous and unlikely that we should allow capitalism, which long ago fulfilled its historical purpose, to continue to prevent us all from progressing toward a collective and individual potential which individuals in the past could only dream about.

Nemesis is not a comet named Smith-Tuttle. Nemesis is the world-wide working class deciding that capitalism has served its purpose and that the time has come to end capitalism now before capitalism has any more opportunities to put an end to us.

Dave Coggan

What Socialists Want (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our aim is to see established a democratic world community without frontiers—in which the natural and industrial resources of the world have become the common heritage of all humanity, and are used in co-operation to produce wealth directly for needs, with free access for all to the available goods and services, according to their own self-defined needs.

A moneyless, stateless world commonwealth is the only framework within which current social problems can be permanently solved, since it is only on this basis that production can be oriented towards satisfying human needs. This social revolution can only be carried out when once a majority of wage and salary workers throughout the world want it, fully understand its implications, and organise democratically and politically to achieve it.

“Abolish Money” – Sinéad O'Connor (1993)

Sinéad O'Connor on SNL.

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The music business certainly contains some odd contrasts. On 5 November, the world’s biggest music publishing company, Time Warner, handed a cheque for £26 million to Elton John and Bernie Taupin for the future marketing rights to all their songs from 1974 onwards, including the next six future albums. This was the largest advance ever paid in music history. It reflected the safety of investing in the popular material involved.

Around the same time, a fairly successful but somewhat more controversial singer hit the headlines, not just of the music press, but also in the tabloids and elsewhere. Sinead O’Connor had torn up a picture of the Pope, live on camera on the “Saturday Night Live” American network comedy show. This only added to an already radical reputation, which had polarised opinion between the “moral majority”, particularly in the States, who see her as a public enemy and figure of hate, and the few who have been intrigued by the passionate protests she has pursued.

On an earlier occasion, she had refused to participate in a concert which was to have ended with a rendition of the Stars And Stripes, and for this Frank Sinatra was quoted as eloquently saying that he would like to “kick her butt”. The Sun did an excited expose about her alleged support for the IRA, which later turned out to be unfounded. She horrified the music industry by refusing to collect her “Brits” and US “Grammy” awards in 1991 as she disagreed with the acquisitive and competitive ethos it represented. Then, at the time of the Gulf War, this popular singing star again distinguished herself from her musical colleagues by nailing her colours to the mast and going on record as being emphatically opposed to the war.

Ugly scenes
In the USA, ugly scenes ensued in which piles of her records have been destroyed in public (no doubt in the name of freedom of expression). In Britain, she has been ridiculed instead, through the somewhat limp wit of radio DJs, attempting pathetically to stray into the vocal exposition of their insipid conservatism.

Matters came to a head last October, when she was violently shouted off the stage at a special New York concert held to commemorate thirty years of records produced by Bob Dylan. How ironic that this smug party held for the protest singer of a previous generation should have displayed such brutal intolerance for someone who had spoken out with views which had protested against certain sacred cows in the 1990s. Did they think that the sixties had been so successful in liberating humanity that “protest” could be quietly laid to rest?

It was in the aftermath of that concert that she announced her resignation from her singing career, stating that she had striven to achieve fame only in order to obtain a platform for certain strongly-held views. She then explained these views in some detail through various press interviews. It was subsequently announced that her record company had then persuaded her to reconsider her decision, and she was therefore included in the bill for an Amnesty International concert.

So what were the ideas which lay beneath this wave of controversy?

The opposition to Sinead O’Connor’s pronouncements about the need to abolish money had a tiresomely familiar ring to socialists. In supposedly radical journals like New Musical Express and supposedly liberal organs like the Guardian the tired old arguments in defence of the money system were trotted out with religious devotion, as if kept permanently ready, to use at the first signs of any heretical statements made against the money god:

  “Take away money, then you take away the pillars of society . . . Money may well be the root of all evil, but what choice do we have? Right now, no money equals no power. No power equals a voice in the wilderness. Sad, but that’s the real world. (NME, 14 November). 

  So you don’t accept that human nature is essentially competitive and that money is just part of this? … But what about you, Sinead? You must have a few quid stacked away somewhere? (NME, 31 October). 

   “Mad Woman in the Attic, Part II”; “I’m not a raving loony”. Sinead O’Connor told the Sun last week. “My biggest aim is to get rid of money”, she continued. “If everyone agreed to do it at the same time, it could happen”. Unsold piles of the last Sinead CD could be the new currency.”(Guardian, 31 October).

Revolutionary socialists, who have been working for many years for the creation of a moneyless system of society, have grown used to these inane defences of the money system. They confuse the notion of a fixed “human nature” with the wide variety of human behaviours which have evolved through the conditions of various social systems. It was of note that in the main NME interview involved, O’Connor made no fewer than fifteen separate references to the urgent need to abolish the money system. Whilst socialists will want to question some of the religious commentaries which were woven in with this, it was very heartening nevertheless to see this proposal receiving this unexpected platform:

   So the only solution to all of the problems in the world — starvation, homelessness, joblessness, etc — is to get rid of money . . .  A survey has to be conducted. Let’s have a vote and see . . . ”If everyone else was going to do it, would you be prepared to live without money?” Let’s see how people feel about it — supposedly we live in a democracy. I bet you that people will be able to do it . . . as long as there exists the system of money, there will always be people who have some and those who haven’t . . .  Ninety-five per cent of the world’s wealth is owned by five per cent of the world’s population. That’s the whole problem . . . We can do it, but there’s no point unless everyone’s gonna do it, it just can’t work . . .  Look at our lives, how they’re run by money . . .  get rid of money. In one foul swoop, you get rid of the whole thing. With love, and our supposed belief in God . . . Have the faith to go through the rocky part and believe that God’s gonna help us out. (NME, 31 October).

Child abuse
She holds the view that most modern social problems had their origin in the rise of the Catholic Church and “Roman Empire” based in the Vatican, with its sanctioning of various invasions and imperialisms, and its imposition of repressive moral codes over millions of people. In her own country of origin, Ireland, she describes how alcoholism, drug-abuse and, in particular, child abuse have in her view been the inevitable legacy of that historical process. She makes no secret of the fact that her own childhood there was plagued by persistent sexual abuse. It might readily be seen that her theorising about the key historical role of the Vatican in the rise of a globally exploitative system is a reflection of her own experiences and is too narrowly based on one interpretation of the development of certain, mainly European countries and in particular of Ireland. She fails to take a broader world view of the ruling class which in fact encompasses all religions, and in many cases none. On the other hand, these arguments are soon tied in with sounder lines of economic criticism:

  We’re all trapped in a society that has been very, very carefully orchestrated and structured to control us by people who want power over us, for money . . . they took us away from the truth, brutalised us and then only offered us one God, a God outside and above us, unattainable. They made our God into money.” (NME, 31 October).

She goes on to explain that the people who did all this were the Catholic Church, especially with reference to their role in Irish history. Again, this is a peculiarly narrow definition of the minority class enemy which exploits us, and leaves out of account the quite separate evolution of ruling groups in other ways in other parts of the world. Her proposed solution, however, of abolishing the social system which is based on money, is both universally applicable and urgently needed. There is an international ruling class which certainly does impose moral codes and supervise institutionalised poverty and abuse.

Regardless of the reservations referred to above, Sinead O’Connor is to be applauded for these specific proclamations which she has pursued so single-mindedly. The profusion of panic, misunderstanding and venom with which her comments were greeted is in fact testimony to the refreshingly different and viable ideas involved.

Clifford Slapper

Greed, need and free access (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Euston area of London there is an Indian vegetarian restaurant where you can eat as much as you like from their buffet for £3.95. Punters have been known to comment that this is “a very reasonable price”. As if there can ever be anything reasonable about having to pay money in order to be able to eat. As if philosophers, in some kind of endless quest for capitalist Reason, have determined that this shall cost £3.95 and a McDonalds’ crapburger shall cost a few pence less and a piece of lettuce with meat in pastry cooked by a chef with a French name shall cost twenty quid a head—booze and service not included. There is nothing reasonable about having to pay to eat. The equivalent of one Hiroshima die every three days due to starvation—they cannot afford to buy food in a world that is subsidizing farmers to destroy food. That is reasonableness under the market system.

But let us return to our Indian buffet—as several of us do, frequently. As well as being a pleasant enough place to eat and talk, this “eat as much as you like” joint is an interesting social laboratory for those of us who advocate a social system where all human beings will have free access to all goods and services available. How often are we told that a moneyless society based upon such a principle would be utterly unworkable? Is it not the case, we are asked, that humans are naturally greedy and will always take more than they need?

Greedy person myth
This old human nature chestnut about the Greedy Person is derived from the stale old Christian belief that basically we are all sinners. According to such dismal reasoning, it is in the nature of the human species to be competitively individualistic—to want to beat his or her neighbour—to take for the sake of acquisition—to be anti-social. Modern advocates of this horrible ideal of humanity speak of selfish genes and our biological propensity to survive at the expense of others. This thinking fits in well with the economic ethos of capitalism with its ruthless war of all against all as its dehumanizing morality. It does not fit in well with what we know to be true about human behaviour. We know that humans are uniquely social animals, with a capacity for co-operation, linguistic communication. planning and empathy far more sophisticated than any other species. We know that the survival of our species has been largely dependent upon our ability to adapt to our environment and respond to it socially. We know that Robinson Crusoe is a literary myth of capitalist origin, whereas in reality “no man is an island” and life is about interdependence.

So back to our “eat as much as you like" laboratory. If the contention of our opponents were true this restaurant would be full of workers eating and eating until they can do nothing but vomit. After all, they are humans, so is it not natural for such greed to prevail? First results do not look very promising. For it is true, and cannot be concealed for the sake of the socialist argument, that quite regularly customers are seen staggering back from the buffet having balanced on to their plates the hugest mountains of food possible without it falling on the floor. It is even true that such people have been spotted, by those with the rudeness to conduct such observations, staggering over a second and occasionally even a third time to stuff themselves. Round One goes to the Human Nature Brigade. But it is an illusory victory.

What is most noticeable about the place is how the vast majority of people do not eat too much or too little, but just what they need. Nobody has to tell them what they need. They know when they are hungry. They know when they are full up. Regardless of the "freedom" to eat as much as they like, they prove that what humans like is to eat what they require, not what they can consume to the point of sickness. This is because the majority of customers are regular eaters at this restaurant. They know that they can have what they want of what is available and that is what they take.

Self-defined needs
But what of the indulgent staggerers from Round One? Two points explain their sad behaviour scientifically. Most of those who take more than they want do so because they have never eaten in this restaurant before. The idea of unrestricted access (albeit within the confines of a set price) is new to them. They are used to having to pay for exactly what they receive, and usually receiving less than they think they should, so they go crazy when the possibility of helping themselves occurs. It is possible to watch a person come into the restaurant week after week, each time taking less, being more selective, feeling more secure about the freedom to satisfy their need. Secondly, we cannot ignore the fact that all of this is going on under capitalism. Some of those who are the biggest consumers are living on a very low budget (several of the mountain-eaters are students from the nearby university) and eat more than they would normally take because for the rest of the week they can only afford to eat less than they need.

We are not suggesting, in case anyone should draw an absurd conclusion, that restaurants were you can eat what you like for £3.95 have anything to do with socialism. The restaurant in question is a capitalist enterprise which is run to make a profit. If they stopped making profits the deal would end. In a socialist society food would no more cost £3.95 than it would cost £39—the price of a modest lunch in a central London hotel. Socialism will be a moneyless society. People will give to society according to their abilities and take according to their needs.

What our "experiment” does demonstrate is that people are capable of behaving reasonably in determining their own needs. The newcomer to a "help yourself" situation is unlikely to behave sociably, because the market system has conditioned us to anti-social, consumerist thinking. Just as most workers would rush in and take as much as they could of everything if the shops were to abolish prices for one day under capitalism, so it is that the worker who is momentarily free to eat without restraint eats without rationality. Abolish prices once and for all, and replace this outdated system with a society of free and equal access for all, based upon self-defined needs, and the social habit of behaving sociably will emerge as surely as the habit of learning to walk for more than six feet in any one direction is adopted by prisoners released from years in a cell.

Steve Coleman

That was the annus that was (1993)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

We haven’t been reading papers like the Mail and the Telegraph all these years without getting to know that the Queen is a historically brilliant woman but, even so, it came as a bit of a shock to learn that, with all her other talents, she can speak Latin. Or at least she can make a rather feeble joke in Latin, complaining that for her 1992 was the Annus Horribilis (when it might have been the usual sort of Annus Mirabilis with lots of money being made for her, lots of sumptuous living and lots and lots of crazily adoring subjects cheering her).

Of course she still had all these things in 1992: what she was regretting was the exposure of her children's activities and relationships in a way which would not once have happened. But this is not 1936, with the press muzzling itself over Edward VIII dallying with Mrs Simpson; nowadays a fierce circulation war among the tabloids practically guarantees the quickest and most glaring exposure of any royal misbehaviour. And then a small bit of Windsor Castle caught fire which did not leave the Queen and the other Windsors exactly homeless but which might have been a public relations triumph until some rather nasty questions were asked about how much money the Queen has, and how many homes and whether she should pay to repair the Castle. But more about the royals later; at the moment we want to consider 1992 and just how horribilis or mirabilis it was and why and what about 1993 and the year after that and so on.

We should remember, first of all. that 1992 was supposed to be the Big One, the year "we" went into Europe, the year "we” joined the ERM as a start to solving "our” economic problems, the year “we" found a new prosperity by moving towards a single European currency. It was also the year when trifling difficulties like the recession, unemployment, bankruptcies, homelessness and increasing numbers of people losing "their" house because they can’t keep paying the mortgage would be solved at a stroke by a Tory election victory. In particular a Conservative win would be such a boost to business confidence that there would be a rush to invest huge amounts of money in industry, which would trigger off a stupendous boom and stimulate everlasting popularity for John Major and his government especially his Chancellor Norman Lamont.

Victory
During the election Major was quite clear about this. For example, at the beginning of April—just before votes were cast—he told fawning Jimmy Young (who else?) that economic recovery was already under way:

  We will not see the statistics to prove it until after the event but there is clear anecdotal evidence, clear survey evidence. that it has started.

Well, enough of the voters believed that to put Major and Lamont back in their homes in Downing Street and what is the situation now? Another kind of anecdotal evidence was provided by the Confederation of British Industry conference last November. This gathering was once a congratulatory jamboree for Tory ministers but this was 1992, the Annus Mirabilis turned Horribilis. One speaker after another blamed the government for the slump (which shows that ignorance about how capitalism works, and why, is not confined to the working class) and complained bitterly about falling profits and investment and mounting bankruptcies. One speaker thought it a criminal matter:

  If the (Conservatives) election manifesto had been a company manifesto it would have landed the entire Cabinet in jail.

The government’s response to this kind of assault is as predictable as it is feeble. Last September on Sky News, Major had some explaining to do about the financial crisis which threw the government into such desperate chaos, putting interest rates up and down several times in the same day and then abruptly taking sterling out of the ERM after they had been telling us for so long that keeping it in the ERM was the only way to save it as an international currency. Major said that the government had been “overwhelmed by circumstances that neither Mr Lamont nor anybody else foresaw or could have dealt with”. This is hardly good enough since Lamont, when it suits him. claims to be able to foresee circumstances—famously he once told us all about noticing the "first green shoots of recovery" and he has by now pretty well exhausted his stock of metaphors in making the same claim. Nor is it good enough for Major to tell as that “what actually happened was an irrational market movement of a size we have not seen before" because the Tories won power in 1979 on a programme based on the assumption that the market is the rational force in society which, left to itself, will sort out all economic problems. In fact the Tories never seriously adopted that policy; the latest proof of this is their intention to intrude in the labour market by trying to hold pay rises in public sector employment below 1.5 percent.

Rainbow
On the matter of economic forecasts and a Chancellor’s ability to control events, Norman Lamont has recently revealed the true limits of his talents to some obviously sceptical journalists:

  What you seem to be asking me is “Why don’t I press some button and the world will change overnight and we will look up and see a rainbow in the sky". I’m afraid that it just isn’t like that and there aren’t these buttons to press.

Well rainbows make a nice change from green shoots as metaphorical portents of economic boom but the message is the same: the experts who say they can control capitalism can’t do it. If their luck is in and they are in office during a boom they may take the credit for it and so become famously popular. If things go the other way they have a rather different attitude; they don’t accept any blame but pass it on to unforeseeable difficulties, or the underhand machinations of foreigners or intractably greedy workers . . . One whose luck seemed to be in, and for a long time, was Nigel Lawson but even he has little cheer to offer Lamont. even he thinks now that Chancellors can’t make any promises:

  I misjudged the strength of the boom. The official forecasts were all over the place . . .  there was this enormous climate of optimism . . .  on the whole a good thing, much better than pessimism, much better than gloom. But again things went too far. (To Terry Coleman. Guardian, 7 November).

So Lamont is the Chancellor for whom the bad things have gone too far and Lawson was the Chancellor for whom the good things went too far. This makes sense only when we realize that capitalism makes impotent all the experts, the economists, the politicians. It works—as it worked in 1992—to its own laws and to satisfy its own needs regardless of what Chancellors do or plan to do, regardless of whether they see green shoots or rainbows or other mirages.

Royal misbehaviour
At times of crisis—if it is appropriate to use such a word about capitalism's never-ending upheavals—the system’s figureheads come into their own, reassuring everyone that, no matter what evidence is before their eyes, all is well. In Britain at such times the royal family are expected to be more prominent, to make even more meaningless speeches, to force their company onto even more distressed people. The message is that, no matter how severe their suffering as loyal, patriotic British workers they will pull through. At least that is the ideal. Our difficulty now is that unemployed people, struggling along on state benefit, are not taking too kindly to hearing this sort of cant from a woman whose personal wealth amounts to anything between £50 million and £6 billion. No-one is exactly sure about the true figure. And then there is the embarrassing fact that recently the royals have been neglecting a most important part of their job—setting an example to the rest of us in the lower orders of society.

As their marriages collapse one after the other under the spotlight of some triumphantly scurrilous press coverage, it is blindingly apparent that this family’s supposed position as guardians of the repressions of Christian marriage—which is bad enough as it is—is pure humbug. After all, the royals are paid a lot of money to do the job of telling the rest of us to be docile, unquestioning subjects of capitalism, by not being sexual adventurers, by not having unstable marriages and by not getting divorced. To some extent the royal conditions of employment can be breached and the media bludgeoned into ignoring it. But the 1990s' Windsors have simply overwhelmed the customary official concealment of their misbehaviour. So they have had a very bad press; even the fire at Windsor didn’t help, raising more inconvenient questions about the extent of royal wealth and how it contrasts to working class hardship. If 1992 was a horrible year for the Queen it was because so many of the delusions on which her position depends became under such intense and hostile questioning.

Poverty
It is ironic that so many of those delusions fester so powerfully among the class whose suffering should compel them to deal only in reality. Unlike Lamont's forecasts, one which is well on the way to being realized is Shelter's estimate in December 1991 that over the next five years more than a million families would become homeless. At that time Shelter said there were nearly 3,000 people sleeping rough and 55,300 households in temporary accommodation. By June 1992 the figure for Greater London alone was nearly 43,000 representing over 100,000 people—an increase of 12 percent over the year. Shelter's director recently described what this means:

  . . . families in bed and breakfast are forced to live in often overcrowded, usually depressing and sometimes downright dangerous hotels for anything up to two years. Imagine what it must be like to have no privacy, for your children to have nowhere to run and play, to have to share a bathroom with an average of 16 other people and a cooker with 21.

It is not just the homeless who are destitute. In 1989—the last year for which official figures are available—12 million people were living below a poverty line of half the average income; by now. as unemployment gets worse, that figure will be much higher. And what does this do to human relationships, so often fragile anyway in capitalist society? The NSPCC lists unemployment and family debt as key causes of child abuse; Relate, the marriage counselling service, calls it all “devastating". Especially poignant is the fact that unemployment is now hitting those areas in which one seemed relatively safe from it, while Tory MPs sat on Gibraltar-like majorities. Among the leafy towns of the South-East and the Home Counties a bitter lesson is being taught—that economic booms are not everlasting, that workers who experience a brief, relative prosperity do not do so through their own ingenuity but because capitalism is then operating in such a way as to allow it.

The hopes that 1992 was to be an Annus Mirabilis were based on misconceptions encouraged by deliberate deceit. It has turned out to be a typical year, in which a huge burden of misery and fear has fallen on an enormous number of people. For those who understand capitalism, as a year it came up to expectations. So what about the New Year? It could see the start of serious work for a society free of delusions—a society without classes and their representatives whether royal or political. We don't need aristocrats and political confidence tricksters to run the world; we can do it ourselves for ourselves. And. yes, we can do it now. In 1993.

Ivan

Letter: Who’s right about human nature? (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The article on human nature we published last August has provoked a critical response from one of our readers. We publish below a long extract from his lengthy letter, together with our reply.

Your article "Is Human Nature a Barrier to Socialism?” (August Socialist Standard) requires comment.

Following a somewhat sloppy overview of the history of evolutionary theory you decide on an onslaught on your defined “social darwinism” and suggest that "painstaking work in the field” by Schaller, Goodall and Fossey “has shown unequivocally that these animals [chimps, gorillas, orang-outangs) do not fundamentally possess any of the characteristics of aggression . . .  that have been attributed to them”.

One can only assume that the comrades who produced this statement have read very little of the author they cite. The fullest account is surely that of Jane Goodall in her The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour (1986). In her chapter on Territoriality. she reports (from many sources, including your George Schaller) that territorial behaviour is widespread in the animal kingdom while in the higher (primate) species it often adopts a frightening and vicious form. Interestingly, the form of the behaviour is determined by, among other things, the size of the territory and the size of the group occupying it. If the territory is small, the boundaries are visited daily and intruders are frightened off—using the ritual behaviour explored so competently by Konrad Lorenz.

If the territory is large, boundaries are less well monitored but the hierarchy within the group is much more rigidly enforced—(again evidence of the findings of Lorenz vis-à-vis the “functions” of social groups). Typically gibbons occupy “smaller” territories, baboons “larger” ones. The early work on the nature of territorial aggression was that of Robert Ardrey who argued that mans most immediate ancestors were apparently non-aggressive apes resembling chimpanzees or gorillas.

He suggested the move to aggressiveness was brought about by environmental factors—he noted the likely effect of increasing aridity in Africa in the relevant time period and the consequent development of carnivorous habits in proto-humanids. Armed with weapons and searching for limited protein resources supplied by animals of the plain, men soon began to compete, formed territories.

Are the chimpanzees of today territorial? Ask Jane Goodall—and she replies strongly in the affirmative. Intruders from the occupied territories are aggressively expelled. boundaries are visited frequently and monitored, boundaries last for a number of years. The manner of the expulsion is determined by the size of groups, however, rather than the locality. If groups are equally balanced there will be auditory displays, ritualized aggressive displays and both sides will retreat. But if one party is considerably smaller, it will simply turn and run.

Among the chimpanzees the sense of group identity is strong; they clearly differentiate between “them” and “us”. Infants and females within the group are protected—those belonging to another group are frequently killed. Non-group members arc not only attacked but the style of the attack may differ from that used in squabbles within the community. Victims (from other groups) are treated more as though they were prey animals—they are “de-chimpized”.

Chimpanzees differ from most other species in that interlopers are not simply chased away but are assaulted and typically left to die. Moreover they do not just attack interlopers but frequently make aggressive raids into the very heart of the "opposing" camp's territory where adult males, and to a lesser extent, females, are killed. Jane Goodall has documented for the National Geographic the total extermination of a "tribe” of chimps in this manner.

The conclusion that Jane Goodall has drawn from her research is rather different from the implications of your article:

  theirs is a form of territoriality that has shifted away from the relatively peaceful, ritualized maintenance of territory typical for many non-human animals, towards a more aggressive type of behaviour, in the chimpanzee, territoriality functions not only to repel intruders from the home range, but sometimes to injure or eliminate them: not only to defend the existing home range and its resources. but to enlarge it opportunistically at the expense of weaker neighbours; not only to protect the female resources of a community, but to actively and aggressively recruit new sexual partners from neighbouring social groups, (p. 528).

She continues by reporting favourably the views of her colleagues who have agreed that “the early practice of warfare would have put considerable selective pressure in the development of intelligence and of increasingly sophisticated co-operation among group members” and further that "the powerful pressure that warfare almost certainly exerted in the development of the human brain . . . if early humanid males were inherently disposed to find aggression attractive, particularly aggression directed against neighbours, this trait would have provided a biological basis for the cultural training of warriors". She speculates on the theme of evolutionary development.

Of course the work of Goodall. Lorenz and Ardrey and the others you refer to should not be seen as hostile to the development of socialist consciouness per se.

We cannot understand ourselves as a species if we do not appreciate our origins from the animal kingdom. We are the product of our history (nature) and of our environment (nurture). We differ from other species in that we have become “self-conscious". In Hegelian terms we are "nature" becoming conscious of itself. It is only by understanding that we are inseparable from our history and our environment that we can even hope to change the world— and, of course, in changing the world we change ourselves.

Bob Potter 

Hove, East Sussex

Reply

We did not say that the anthropoid apes never behaved in an aggressive way. What we said was what you quote: “that these animals do not fundamentally possess any of the characteristics of aggressiveness and the rest that have been attributed to them”. By “fundamentally” we meant something built-in to their genetic structure that compelled them to act aggressively on all occasions. Jane Goodall certainly recorded aggressive behaviour by chimpanzees but that is not the point at issue which is whether or not this behaviour is inherent. Even you concede that it is a function of size of territory.

Goodall was one of a number of researchers whose work helped dispel the myth, perpetuated by such films as King Kong, that the anthropoid apes were ferocious and dangerous wild beasts. Her later Ardrey-like speculations on the significance of the territorial behaviour of chimpanzees for human behaviour cannot detract from this.

The naturalists of the later part of the 19th century regarded the Great Apes of the pongid line, gorillas, chimpanzees and orang utans, as by nature ferocious aggressive animals. No objective research on how these animals actually behaved was undertaken before about 1960. When it was, the research workers found that the stereotype held by the Victorians of nature red in tooth and claw was completely erroneous.

Instead they all found that these animals' behaviour was very much like the behaviour of human beings, generally pacific and co-operative but also aggressive under certain circumstances. The real difference between human beings and the Great Apes is that the behaviour of human beings is mostly learned behaviour. In other words, human beings can invent new behaviour. The anthropoid apes can't do this very much so that their behaviour remains more or less constant.

The Naked Ape School of Human Nature revived a completely erroneous concept of how modern anthropoid apes behaved, one of violence, and claimed that we humans descended from them differing only in being relatively hairless. when in fact the human line in evolution moved away about 9-12 million years ago in the shape of Ramapithecus.

In any event, conclusions about human behaviour cannot be drawn from animal behaviour. This was the major mistake of the Ardrey group. They attempted to extrapolate from the animal kingdom, particularly from the behaviour patterns of the modern anthropoid apes (but also of greylag geese) and apply them to human beings. But findings which may be authentic for apes and geese do not thereby apply to homo sapiens. Attempts to do this by Ardrey, Lorenz, Morris and Storr have been shown to be completely erroneous by many of the foremost anthropologists of the day.

Taking into account that our critic has insinuated that we have not read very much of the relevant research work, we suggest he would do well to broaden his own horizon in this field by reading some of the following Orang Utan, Orphans of the Forest by Monica Borner with Bernard Stone house. Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens? by John Lewis and Bernard Towers, Man and Aggression, edited by Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression by Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm, Evolution in Action by Julian Huxley, and Prehistoric Man by Vratislav Mazak (to name a small number of many).

Editors

Letters: Hypocrisy about drugs (1993)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hypocrisy about drugs

Dear Editors,

November saw what was billed as European Drug Prevention Week, yet another disingenuous smoke-screen perpetrated by governments and their statutory bodies. It will no doubt have had the effect of lowering any awareness of the genuine issues relating to excessive drug-use in society, whilst also diverting people from the social causes of drug-abuse.

A genuine drug-awareness week would have exposed the hypocrisy of the governments of the western world and their “War on Drugs” with which they target cocaine, opiates, marihuana and other recreational drugs. Simultaneously they support and protect the producers of alcohol and tobacco (the two biggest killers in Britain) and their markets. In return for this protection (subsidies to farmers, licences permitting the sale of products, etc.) they extort massive amounts of taxes. Protection rackets like these would be familiar to the Colombian cocaine cartels which have been so demonised by Kenneth Clarke and others.

Socialists should need little reminding that the moral values of a particular society often bear close relation to the economic interests of that society's ruling class. This is demonstrated by current attitudes in legal and governmental circles to illegal and legal drugs. However, perhaps we should expect some changes in coming years as western businessmen and women and their respective governments realize that there are certain profits and tax revenues for all who are in a position to stake a claim. These kind of changes remain unlikely whilst governments use drugs as a handy scapegoat for the problems obvious to all in our blighted inner-cities.

Drug Prevention Weeks and similar campaigns such as Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No!” offer nothing to disaffected youngsters facing a life on the dole, or years of tedious wage-slavery. Is it any wonder that whilst life on the capitalist treadmill offers us so little many workers find solace in drugs? Those who then develop drug problems such as physical or psychological addiction have insult added to physical injury by their treatment by the authorities. Rather than supportative and sympathetic treatment for what are medical problems, drug users are more likely to be castigated as social deviants, criminals and outcasts.

Whilst the establishment of a socialist society would not eradicate all drug problems it would certainly offer people opportunities to engage in cooperative. socially-useful work and foster feelings of social solidarity. Such a society would be far removed from the competitive, individualistic capitalism of today in which so many workers find solace in both legal and illegal drugs.

Peter Owen 

Llandudno

Socialism and Religion

Dear Editors,

Very interested to see your endorsement of Tory Michael Caine’s criticism of all religion as cant (Sting in the Tail, November).

Some of us are not only Christians but Socialists as well, opposing war as an immoral pointless means of defending markets and supplies.

Some of us are Christians who believe that capitalism equals exploitation, making the rich richer at the expense of the poor, and that Socialism is the answer to this injustice. Christian Socialists condemn injustice committed by Christian and non-Christian.

Tarring all Christians with the same brush is akin to equating all socialists with supporters of Stalinism.

Ken Cole 

Preston

We still see an inconsistency in being committed to the establishment of a free, socialist society through the democratic self-organisation of the working class without leaders and believing that humanity needs to be saved by some supernatural being who supposedly lived and died 2000 years ago and will return some day to establish his kingdom on Earth— Editors.

Drop the "Great"

Dear Editors,

From time to time readers write in to the Socialist Standard objecting to the “Great” in the Party’s full title, Socialist Party of Great Britain.

A few years ago you correctly pointed out to one such critic that you no more thought Britain was actually a “Great” country, as opposed to other capitalist nations (all of them that is) than you thought Clapham High Street was actually higher up than other streets.

Unfortunately there will always be a number of readers of socialist literature who feel irritated or offended by your use of “Great".

Since it does not matter. Great Britain and Britain being interchangeable terms, why not drop the “Great” from the Party’s title now?

R. Taylor

South Shields

In point of fact we now generally refer to ourselves simply as the Socialist Party, reserving our full title only in the international and historical contexts and for formal purposes— Editors.

Between the Lines: The Road to Nurenberg (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Something dangerous is happening. Mind manipulation has become one of the growth industries of the late twentieth century. Three examples from the year just gone: the use made of the media by Clinton, Perot and Major. Each in their own way showed that leaders with money can afford to have contempt for democratic debate.

The Clinton Presidential campaign was a masterpiece of saying nothing winningly. Millions of Americans were sucked within the emptiness of Clinton's fake-smile reformism. They abdicated their power to control their own lives to a man committed to the continuation of their exploitation — a man advised by well-paid media consultants (i.e. propagandists) whose task was to trample all over their political intelligence.

The bizarre earthiness of the Perot campaign appeared to be a contrast to all that. But it was not. The key to the Perot style was the appearance of the man next door being projected with the aid of millions of dollars on to a Texan billionaire whose class interests were diametrically opposed to those with whom he chatted from the screen as if he leaning over the fence. The entire Perot campaign was a media hoax, made possible solely by the possession of huge funds.

The Tory election victory last year was again a victory of form over content: of the myth of Major, the local lad made good, over Kinnock, the unreliable loser. These were big moments in what could have been wide, intelligent popular debates. That is certainly what workers looked for when they campaigned for the vote. The danger is not just that these perversions of democracy are happening, but that they go un-noticed, unchallenged. It is as if arrogant media men who believe that the dignity of human intelligence is degradable to a sordid exercise in mind manipulation have invaded our living rooms and, through the medium of TV, created a world where workers are mere followers, extras in the movie of life, spectators upon our own world.

How odd it now seems that half a century ago workers thought that they were fighting to defend democracy. What they were fighting for, amongst other economic aims, was to preserve and consolidate the more subtle dictatorship of capital of Britain and America against the crude thuggery of fascistic and naked dictatorship. A chilling reminder of that Nazi moment in history was BBC2's showing of Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 propaganda classic, Triumph of the Will (12.05am, Saturday 19 December). This was the famous film in which Hitler's presence at a Nurenberg rally was presented as an inspiring romance of nationalist inspiration. It had an enormous impact, apparently causing German cinema audiences to weep with uncontrollable joy.

Viewed today the film's propagandist zeal to aggrandise the Fuhrer and turn the worshipping followers into a single, amorphous mass of robotic dancers to the fascist will, seems transparent and even faintly ridiculous in its pretensions. In Iran, Iraq, China and many more dictatorships too numerous to list the transparency might be less evident: what would be more obvious is the similarity to the backward propaganda methods of those states.

But Riefenstahl was in the mould of 1984, and by and large we can say that 1984 has passed and the uncouth propaganda of leader-worship has not triumphed. But the road from Nurenberg has not led to democracy. It has led to the triumph of sophisticated media trickery. We shudder — and rightly so — at neo-Nazi fools performing imitation goosesteps. and other more sickening acts, in the streets of Germany, but the biggest threat will not come from them. It will come — it already does come — from those whose dismissal of the intelligence of the majority is not reflected in the culture of the jackboot: it is exhibited by the culture of TV-run politics. It is no more sensible to let a factory owner organise his workers in a strike than to allow these money-governed mind-manipulators to tell us how and what to think. Something dangerous is happening and it is only the vitality and will to organise ourselves for ourselves that can overcome it.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: The Rich are no Longer with Us (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

All sorts of people who profess to know the facts go on telling us that the old inequalities have disappeared and the rich are no longer with us. All we can say is that if the rich have gone there are still some people about who are able to spend a lot of money as witness the following headline in the News-Chronicle (December 23. 1942): “Grapes 85/ - a pound; Roses 4/6 each in West End Orgy of Spending”.

But the facts are not really in dispute. The ownership of land, factories, railways, etc, is still predominantly vested in the numerically small capitalist class, and if their profits are being heavily taxed during the war they have no doubt that things will improve for them when the war is over. We have yet to hear of heirs to millionaire estates refusing to accept them because they will be valueless or unnecessary in the new world after the war.

Lord Glanely, 71-year-old shipowner and racehorse owner, recently left estate worth £1,813,625, on which death duties amounted to £860,722 (Daily Telegraph, November 27, 1942). and note the following from the Evening Standard (December 15. 1942):—

  The Duke of Westminster's estates have been estimated to be worth about £20,000,000. He has sold portions of them, such as the great family mansion in Park Lane, on the site of which Grosvenor House now stands, and eight acres in Millbank. on which Thames House stands. He still owns 600 acres in Mayfair and Belgravia, in addition to 30,000 in Cheshire, and an estate in Scotland.

  The Duke, now 62, lives at Eaton, Cheshire. He was in the Home Guard for a time, but the reduction of the age limit barred him from further service.

[From “Notes by the Way” by “H", Socialist Standard, January 1943.]

They said it . . . (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

• It is tough out there in every industry— Michael Heseltine’s son Rupert after being made redundant 
• Conservatives do not stab people in the back—Rhodes Boyson MP 
• No aristocrat has ever died of this disease—Bert Connor, chairman of Clydeside Action on Asbestos.
• The Prince and Princess of Wales do not have a bottomless pit from which to draw money—Buckingham Palace spokesman.
• To be identified as the child of a politician is just terrible—son of a former Cabinet Minister and Chairman of the Tory Party.
• If a woman upsets you, alright. It's part of their function in life—Judge John Lee, Hereford Crown Court.
• What we see is obscene and should not happen in a civilised society—Director of Kent Social Services on the homeless.

Colour barred (1993)

Book Review from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Never Counted Out! By Michael Herbert. (Dropped Aitches Press. Manchester. 1992. £4.95.)

This book recounts the boxing career and political activity of Len Johnson, one of the best middleweights of the 1920s. Despite meeting, and sometimes beating, some of the best boxers in the world Johnson was not allowed to compete for British or Commonwealth titles because of an official ban on “coloured" boxers.

As Herbert points out:

 The need to maintain the myth of European superiority in social as well as political life becomes apparent. A contest between black and white in the boxing ring could too easily become a metaphor for the stability of the Empire should white boxers be regularly defeated.

As part of the small black community which had settled in Manchester after the opening of the Ship Canal in 1894, Johnson, born of an African father and an Irish Mancunian mother in 1902, faced hardship and racial discrimination.

He experienced boxing at its toughest—training in the back yard with a skipping rope made from a piece of clothesline—and earning only £1 from his first professional fight.

In a professional career which spanned twelve years— from 1921 to 1933—Johnson had 127 contests, of which he won 92. lost 29 and drew 6. But despite his prowess in the ring he was only able to make a living wage from the sport and financial difficulties forced him to make a come-back in 1931 despite suffering from rheumatism in both elbows.

Towards the end of the second world war Johnson joined the Communist Party and this marked the start of his political activity. He was a founder member and secretary of the New International Society which was formed in Moss Side, Manchester in 1946. The society’s fight against racial segregation abroad and discrimination at home soon led to the Communist Party trying to control it. A policy document dated 2 December 1948 states:

 Apart from the Society, there is no effective means of winning the support or neutralising colonial individuals or groups which, for a variety of reasons, do not join the Party.

In the 1950s, Johnson campaigned energetically on behalf of the singer Paul Robeson who had had his passport withdrawn for Communist activities in the USA. He also stood as a Communist Party candidate in Manchester local elections on six occasions, his small vote dwindling each time as Cold War conditions hardened.

In 1962 Johnson seems to have dropped out of political activity completely, possibly due to ill health because he remained a Communist Party member until his death in 1974.

This account of the machinations of the Communist Party in trying to manipulate and control groups which could serve its interests, combined with meticulous research to discover the boxing career of one of the sports forgotten heroes makes fascinating reading, but it needs to be stated that it is the barbarity of capitalism's economic system which forces workers to risk injury to earn a living. It was also a complete waste of Johnson's considerable abilities and energy to campaign for a politically dishonest organization such as the Communist Party and its now discredited state-capitalist policies.

Carl Pinel

Prisons, suicide and profit (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain imprisons more people per head of population than any other European country— 97 per 100,000. Even Turkey, with a repressive government and penal laws based on the criminal code of Mussolini's Italy, and with thousands of political prisoners, cannot match Britain. And racist South Africa imprisons only 33 people per 100,000.

Neither does it look as if Britain’s prison population will decrease. A Home Office “forecast based on the assumption that crime will rise” (Guardian, 25 July 1991) suggests there will be over 54,000 prisoners in England and Wales in 1998.

For the vast majority of British inmates, theirs is a sordid world of overcrowding in decrepit prisons, slopping out, irregular visits, locked up for 23 hours a day, with frustrated and indifferent guards to contend with. Is it any wonder, then, that a significant number of prisoners, even though accustomed to a life of deprivation, inequality and humiliation on the outside, cannot cope with all that prison entails—the shock of arrest and detention, separation from loved ones, shame, anxiety and uncertainty—and decide to end their lives?

Between 1986 and 1990, 179 inmates committed suicide. In 1991 a further 42 took their own lives. Two thirds of these prisoners were on remand and were yet to be sentenced. What makes the case for remand victims so poignant is that 59 percent are acquitted or given a non-custodial sentence when their cases are heard—some 27,000 out of 65,905 in 1989 (the last year for which statistics are available). An average of eight inmates a day attempt suicide or mutilate themselves—there were 3,000 reported cases last year. “We are talking about attempted hangings, slashing of the wrists, people cutting pieces of themselves" (Frances Crook, Director of Howard League, Independent, 17 April).

Judge Stephen Tumin’s 123 recommendations following his investigation into prison suicides and the 600-page Woolf Report four months later did little to better the lot of inmates or to alleviate the mental burden of the suicidal, in spite of both reports being damning indictments of British prisons, where priority was often "to process as quickly as possible a large number of prisoners with the minimum of disturbance" (Judge Tumin, Guardian, 20 December 1990).

Judge Tumin’s recommendations included redesigning cells to prevent suicide, better screening, improved codes of practice to reduce anxiety levels, and better standards regarding toilets, basins and privacy. The Woolf Report recommended that prison accommodation should match the number of prisoners by the end of 1992 and that jails should only allow overcrowding by three percent for seven days, after that on parliamentary approval. In spite of all that has been reported suicides in prisons continue apace and. although two-thirds of prisons have given more time for visits. chamber pots and overcrowding are still the normal way of life in many prisons.

In April, the government decided that the prison service in England and Wales would be taken away from ministerial control within a year to give managers increased operational independence. Kenneth Baker, the then Home Secretary, remarked how agency status would provide "the most positive environment for staff to work in and, above all, ensuring the delivery of an improved service both to the public and to those held in custody" (Guardian, 12 March). He did not mention that this would shield the government from the backlash following prison scandals and riots, and save a few quid into the bargain.

The scene now looks set for a privatised prison service with all that “privatisation” entails. In April. The Wolds prison in Hull was opened after Group 4 Remand Services beat off eight other competitors with a £4 million tender to run the £35.6 million prison, built to house 320 non-category A inmates.

The Howard League for Penal Reform, who carried out the first independent research into the management of privatised detention centres in Britain, discovered "obsessive secrecy, racist stereotyping and no tangible commitment to justice". The Howard League believes profiteering from prisons pushes up numbers and asserted that “The Wolds prison would be a showcase (for Group 4) so that other more lucrative pickings can be canvassed from other world regimes" (Guardian, 2 April).

The 50 percent cut to prison education in April contradicted the government White Paper of September 1991 put out in response to the Woolf Report: “many prisoners have inadequate educational and social skills . . . without such skills the prospects for prisoners to live fulfilling and law abiding lives on release will be greatly diminished" (Guardian, 18 April).

Prisons, all said, are made necessary by the capitalist system as they are built to house those whose “deviancy” and “anti-social behaviour” is determined by the social system they are conditioned to live in. The problem of the crimes they commit

should be approached not only as a product of the unequal distribution of wealth and chaotic labour market, but also an important aspect of the demoralising social relations and individualistic ideology that characterises the capitalist mode of production in its highest phase. (T. Platt, Crime and Social Justice, 1978).

In removing the “unproductive elements” of capitalist society. prisons strengthen "the prevalent ideology that it is individuals not institutions that are to blame for social problems and for social failures . . . [prison] therefore serves to legitimize the basic institutions of capitalist society". By keeping the "unproductive” out of sight, the prison provides an ideological veil to obscure the brutal consequences of our productive process” (M. Fitzgerald, Prisoners in Revolt, 1977).

Imprisoning those who “stray" solves nothing, for the present system of inequality, alienation and powerlessness that countless millions toil under will always churn out those willing to risk their freedom to better their lot and even things up a little bit. Only the dismantling of the capitalist system will bring with it an end to the need for prisons.

John Bissett

Sting in the Tail: Food for thought (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food for thought

Fancy a nice juicy steak? The Meat and Livestock Commission want to make sure that you do and have issued a booklet to assure us that eating meat is both physically safe and morally sound.

The booklet (available in supermarkets) dismisses most vegetarians as either bogus or having "a misconception about a healthy diet”. This doesn’t help veg sales but supermarkets know that people spend a lot more on meat than they do on veg.

We are then told that meat is good for just about every part of us, and be warned -

Britain has the highest rate of heart disease among EC countries, but the second lowest meat consumption per head.

No mention is made of the 74,000 cattle which have died in Britain of mad cow disease since 1985.

All this we can expect from any organisation trying to boost sales but just look at what follows under the heading "Does eating meat deprive the third world of grain?" - 

There is already a world surplus of grain and so if it was simply a matter of availability of grain supplies then there would not be a problem. THE PROBLEM OF HUNGER LIES IN POVERTY AND NOT AVAILABILITY (their emphasis).

THAT we don't expect, but we welcome having the socialist case against capitalism backed-up and especially from such an unlikely source.

False prophets

After the Tory election victory the British holiday industry's market forecasters were convinced that the foreign holiday market would grow again because of the expected boom, so more hotel rooms and aircraft were booked.

Sadly, the boom went bust and Thomson, the biggest package holiday operator, estimated in June that there were 500,000 too many holidays on sale.

Yet only five months later the industry reported a 5% increase in demand in 1992 (Ceefax 15 November). Having- been let down by the boom that- wasn't they had been saved by . . . the recession!

Apparently, many redundant workers are spending their redundancy money on a foreign holiday in the belief that it may be their last for a long time.

Can readers think of a more futile job in capitalism than market forecasting? Answers on a postcard please to Scorpion, address at the bottom of this page.

Raving Mad

The news that 5 young people have died in Greater Manchester since 1989 from dance floor dehydration and heatstroke accentuated by drugs such as Ecstasy, has alarmed the local city council.

Their concern is understandable when it is realised that one of the contributory factors has been the dance hall owners trick of charging £2 for a drink of water.

The money conscious entrepreneurs turn up the heating, cut off the water supply in the toilets and wait for the dehydrated drugged dancers to stump up the two quid for a glass of water.

If the dehydrated youngsters can't afford the two quid and drop dead - well, that's just market forces at work, isn't it?

Useless Money

Currency speculators have been on the rampage recently with "runs" on the pound, the French franc and several other European currencies.

Nowadays the world's money markets have immense sums of money at their disposal. Ex-Labour chancellor Dennis Healy estimated that only one fiftieth of this money is required for world trade settlement ("Greed" Channel 4, 8 November) so the rest is available for speculation.

So any "weak" currency is singled out for attention and the speculators know they will win. Sweden lost almost all of its foreign reserves trying to defend the Krona while the Bank of England lost £11 billion of "our” foreign reserves in a bid to defend sterling. The attack on sterling was led by the City of London and there wasn't a patriotic scruple in sight.

And after all the frenzied activity in which millions had been won and lost, society had not one whit more food, clothing, shelter or health care to show for it.

A Star Is Born

And now for our showbiz update! The word is that professor J.K.Galbraith, Keynesian economist and new comic genius, was a smash in his London one-man show.

The Guardian (25 November) reports him joking that in future "the social left" must give up "socialist principles” and is "no longer in search of an alternative economic system" to capitalism! His deadpan irony would have any audience in stitches.

The prof, surely had them rolling in the aisles when he hit them with such show-stopping vote catchers as "reasonably full employment", "more equitable distribution of income" and "needs of the underclass". Only proves once again that the old jokes are the best jokes!

Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson, Paul Merton and co., have one hell of an act to follow!

A Royal Mess

The Queen has had a pretty shitty 1992. Well, we’re sorry to hear it, but then it was hardly a wonderful year for the rest of us either.

Commenting on the Joseph Rowntree Trustee report on what a family needed to live on, The Independent (15 November) noted that a single parent bringing up two children under 11 on income support received £25.12 less than the Low Cost Budget of £110.72. This Low Cost Budget was reckoned to be the basic minimum necessary to live in 1992.

The newspaper reported the position of Kathleen Elliot who receives £85.60 to bring up Kirsty eight and Stacy three in a working class estate in Gateshead.

"Some nights I just cry myself to sleep. We live in a three bedroomed house, but at this time of year we all sleep in the same double bed and throw Kirsty's duvet on top as well. It's warmer that way. I can't afford the heating. . . .  I just buy essentials like bread, tatties, beans. Can’t afford meat, though sometimes I get sausages."

Not only are Kathleen, Kirsty and Stacy living in abject poverty and misery, but even the Queen is pissed off. Let's get rid of capitalism for all their sakes!

A seller's life (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

One aspect of the market system is the selling of their mental and physical energies by members of the working class to "earn a living". We use the term “working class" in its widest sense: all those men. women and children who depend for their livelihood on selling their ability to work to an employer, dependants of those earners, the self-employed, those seeking an employer or who have had one (or more) and are now living on a pension. In other words, about 98 percent of the population. The other 2 percent own sufficient of the means of wealth production and distribution to enable them to live on profits, rents or interest on capital.

The labour, or more accurately the labour power, of workers—whether skilled or unskilled, experienced or inexperienced, poorly paid or relatively highly paid—is bought and sold in a market. But it is not like a supermarket or a car market or a housing market, where things change hands for money. In the labour market people are bought and sold. Not, of course, quite like slaves. The capitalist system is more subtle than that. It is the working capacities of people that are bought and sold, usually by periods of time, less often by piece-work or the amount of goods produced or finished.

Unequal deal

How fair are the terms of the transaction? Is it a case (as most economists would have us believe) of a willing buyer meeting a willing seller at a mutually acceptable price? Hardly. Capitalists, in their role as as employers, dictate the price at which they will buy labour power and even whether they will buy it at all. They have to make a profit from the use of that labour if they are to stay in business. So they compete with each other, not to bid up the price of labour power—though this does sometimes happen when particular types of labour are scarce—but to make the greatest profit from using it.

Trade unions help to prevent the price of labour power falling. Non-unionists may be exploited more easily by employers happy to pay the lowest wages acceptable to workers often desperate for employment. Such employers have recently been helped by the governments decision to abolish the Wages Councils, which set minimum wages for 2.5 million low-paid workers, 80 percent of whom are women.

The recession verging on slump means that unemployment is rising. Currently the official unemployment rate is just over 10 percent, with the true rate—counting all people who would like paid work— much higher. In Britain as a whole there are now 25 people chasing every job vacancy and in London the figure has risen to 56 (Evening Standard. 4 November).

Job training has a rapidly growing partner: job-seeking training. There are books, talks and classes on how best to present yourself at a job interview, how to write a CV, how to become one of the lucky one-in-25—or 56.

Special problems face those who seek to earn a living selling goods or services. Money is tight and sales resistance high. Only supcrsalespcrsons make decent money. One supersalesman hired the Wembley Conference Centre to bring his message of super- salesmanship to a keenly competitive, if not desperate audience. Part of his act was to carry a skull under his arm, raising its hinged head to display a chocolate-bar-sized product inside. "It gets peoples attention", he claimed enthusiastically. Interviewed briefly on television news, a couple of the punters said why they paid to see such nonsense: they wanted to get one jump ahead of their competitors, they were prepared to learn new and degrading tricks to earn what must mostly be a precarious living.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

Gavin Kennedy, in his book Superdeal, writes about how sellers are forced to be leaner and meaner if they are to survive. “The hungrier (the sellers) are, the faster they spend their money, preferably while in abject debt, the better they are at reaching their sales targets”. Psychological studies are mined for the help they can give to this process of exploitation. “All good sellers know that one of the most powerful selling closes is to play on the ego, or conscience, of the buyer. They shame you into a ‘buy’ decision".

Leaner and meaner

Fictional literature, which so often reflects real life, dramatizes selling. Willie Loman, in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, epitomizes an ageing pawn in the capitalist game. Desperate to be liked by his potential customers, he is enjoined to "never fight fair with a stranger in the jungle". In the play Glengarry Glen Ross (now also a film) salesmen in a Chicago real estate office vie with each other to sell overpriced land in faraway Arizona, knowing that all but the two most successful of them will lose their jobs at the end of the week.

Buying and selling is the essence of the free-market capitalist system. That system has proved to be more efficient at producing wealth than the state bureaucratic or centrally-planned capitalist system. But at what human cost? It is sometimes claimed that workers’ co-operatives are the answer. But unfortunately these, too, have to work within the capitalist system. In the absence of socialist understanding, they are eventually overwhelmed by that system. The only way to end the exploitation and human degradation inherent in capitalism is to develop socialist ideas of production solely for use, so that corresponding practices may follow. Then buying and selling will be relegated to the status of a game of monopoly, amusing but nothing to do with maintaining a decent life.

Stan Parker