Voice From The Back: Keep ’em laughing (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keep ’em laughing

“ATTITUDE CHANGERS” That’s what we call our irresistible HERMAN™ cartoon posters that will motivate employees to . . .

Show up every day

Show up on time

Turn out better work

At lower cost, too!

. . . instead of laughing at you or your company, they’re laughing at HERMAN. Clement Communications (UK) Ltd.

What a surprise!

Police forces across the country have been taking part in a huge fiddle in which they have pretended to detect tens of thousands of crimes and have wiped from the records a mass of other petty crimes, a Guardian investigation has revealed . . . In some cases the crimes were pure fiction invented simply so that they could be listed as detected. The criminals were virtually guaranteed that they would not be prosecuted. Some of them were rewarded with day trips out of prison, free meals and visits to girl friends. Guardian, 18 March

Still mystified

The combination [of high growth and low inflation] has been called the US economic miracle, and I do not think anyone has put their finger on how it works. One of the main factors is the growing use of technology, which allows companies to keep down costs. Despite the low level of unemployment, at 4.4 percent, there is less security in the jobs market, so wages and inflation are unlikely to rise at a rate that would cause inflation in the economy. Financial Mail on Sunday, 14 March.

Human meat market

Egypt’s prosecutor-general has launched an investigation into claims that 25 children were killed at a shelter for the homeless over a three-month period and their body parts sold to wealthy transplant patients in private hospitals . . . The children, many of them illegitimate, had been abandoned and left to fend for themselves on the streets . . . Both Egypt’s Muslims and Christians frown upon sex outside marriage and newspapers are full of stories of relatives killing women they suspect of being sexually active. Unmarried mothers are often forced to abandon their children out of fear and shame. Guardian, 18 March.  

Couldn’t cope

June Randall, a 25-year-old mother described as “distraught”, went on the run this week after snatching her three children as she visited them. The youngsters, all under six, were living in two foster homes after Miss Randall disappeared for a while last December when the children were living with her. She is thought to have said that she couldn’t cope. She is separated from the children’s father and has abandoned her home. Evening Mail, 26 March.

Expand or bust

Early one morning last week at a City livery hall senior executives from leading multinationals—IBM, British Telecom, Levis and Kodak among them—met to mull over problems they all face in doing business in the 21st century, including how to influence governments. Sinister? Only if you believe the sole purpose of business is to make profits. Here was an intriguing sign of the times. The topic before this group, convened by BT, came from a publication in which chairman, Sir Ian Vallance, proclaimed: “The pursuit of sustainable development is not an option—it is nothing more or less than a necessity for our economic survival.” Guardian, 18 March.

The filthy rich

It was 10 years ago that the Exxon Valdez oil tanker hit rocks in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into pristine waters and devastating wildlife and the local economy . . . only two out of 28 injured species have recovered. Numbers of many species, including killer whales, are still declining. And commercial fishermen are still earning less than in 1989. Things look rosier in the head office of the company responsible for the disaster, Exxon (which trades as Esso in Europe). Last year, the company made more money than any other global corporation–$8.5 bn . . . Exxon can afford to clean up its act, but it chooses not to. A similar disaster could occur at any time. And Exxon is one of the most aggressive lobbyists against effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change. In fact, Esso’s bosses find it convenient to believe that global warming is not taking place, against the views of the vast majority of scientists. Exxon was behind plans, exposed in 1998, for a $6m PR campaign to undermine climate science . . . Esso’s parent company is still shipping oil in the outdated, single-hulled tankers and in the old, leaking Trans-Alaska Pipeline. In the seas between Russian and Japan it is discharging toxic wastes into the sea etc, etc. [The accompanying photograph is of the Exxon Valdez, now refurbished and renamed Sea River Mediterranean, taking on crude oil at Hound Point, South Queensferry.] Glasgow Herald, 24 March.

Editorial: The Balkan War (1999)

Editorial from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again European cities are being bombed. Once again displaced persons are on the move. This has never ceased to be the lot of people in Africa and Asia but one of the claims of Western capitalism was that it had at least established peace and prosperity in Europe. Now full-scale war has returned to Europe. The illusion that permanent peace and prosperity is possible under capitalism has been shattered.

The NATO bombing raids on Yugoslavia are aimed not just at direct military targets but at the industrial infrastructure of power stations, fuel depots, factories, chemical plants, roads, railways and bridges which serve civilian purposes as well as supplying the Serbian military machine. All this represents the destruction of useful wealth. As Socialists have always said, war means social regression.

But is it sometimes necessary? Although we are not pacifists (we would countenance fighting should a pro-capitalist minority take up arms to try to prevent the democratic establishment of socialism) we say there is no such thing as a “just war”. Wars are fought over markets, investment outlets, raw material sources and trade routes and strategic points to control them.

The present Balkan War is no different. It is a continuation of the process that started in 1991 when Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, in which the stake has been: who shall control the territories of the former Yugoslavia—Serbia or the West, in particular Germany?

When “communism” (in reality state capitalism) collapsed, the NATO powers had a choice. Let the Serbian ruling class continue to maintain order and stability in the area so that trading and profit-making there could continue normally. Or apply the principle of “national self-determination” in the hope that a collection of smaller, more “ethnically pure” states would provide greater stability.

Reunited Germany, with its historic enemy Russia on its knees, was able to revive its ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe and it led the way in working for the break-up of Yugoslavia so that it, rather than Serbia, could dominate the area. First Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, then Macedonia broke away or rather were broken away. The result, however, has not been stability. Quite the reverse, with only a NATO army of occupation maintaining a fragile peace in Bosnia and eastern Croatia.

And now Kosovo. Serbia claims that it is fighting to retain Kosovo because this is the cradle of “Serbian civilisation”, but there is more at stake than the bones of Prince Lazar. As retired Canadian Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, who commanded UN troops in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo, has pointed out: “Quite frankly, they want the northern half of Kosovo. That’s where the mines and natural resources are” (Times Colonist, Victoria, 26 March). There has been speculation in the media that this may be the compromise that will emerge once the killings and bombings have stopped: the partition of Kosovo with Serbian forces controlling an ethnically-cleansed north and a NATO army of occupation looking after the impoverished refugees in the south.

Faced with this latest manifestation of capitalist barbarity and cynicism we once again place on record our abhorrence of all war and call upon workers everywhere to unite to bring the war-prone capitalist system to a speedy end.

Watching the war go by (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalists have never gone to war to promote Justice and they never will.

Last year The Most Dangerous Man In The World was Saddam Hussain. Pronounced Sadaaam Hoosayn by the plastic propagandists employed to spin the latest line for CNN. There had never been a nastier dictator than the Evil Saddaaam and that was why forces of the American Empire—sorry, NATO—had to “go in there and kick ass”. Any resemblance to a gangland settling of scores should be ignored. After all, that upright defender of virtue, Slick Willy Clinton, had cast himself as Batman against the Iraqi Joker, with wee Tony doing his best to look like Robin.

But let us not distract ourselves with nostalgia. That was yesterday’s war. Now, in the world of CNN-speak, an even more demonic evil has come to threaten the stability of the globe. Plucky little Kosovo must be defended. Think not of the fact that nine out of ten Americans had never heard of Serbia, let alone Kosovo, until CNN told them about it fifty times a day. The threat to the New World Order has been identified. Milosevic must be banged to rights. The propagandists, using a script uncannily similar to Wag The Dog (a fictional account of a sleazy US President saving his reputation by a bogus war against Albania), invite us to shout and curse against the crimes of the Belgrade regime.

And, blinded by the light of the TV screen, large numbers of decent people are weeping for the oppressed Kosovars and cheering NATO as it drops its bombs on Serb towns and villages. Because most people are decent and they hate to see injustice against a defenceless minority, so they are sucked in to the drama of war.

But there are some other defenceless minorities whose plight is not shown on CNN. There are some defenceless minorities for whom NATO would not so much as fire a shot from an air gun. In fact, the NATO states are the very ones which have sold the weapons by which these defenceless minorities are oppressed. For example . . .

There are the Kurds in Turkey. Between 1990 and 1994 about one million Turkish Kurds were driven from their homes. Over 40,000 Kurds have been killed. And in 1994 Turkey became the biggest single importer of US military equipment and the world’s largest arms purchaser. Turkey is a member of NATO. Its troops are currently part of the NATO forces in Yugoslavia. Why is NATO attacking Serbia and not Turkey? The US administration justifies Turkish state atrocities on the grounds that they are defending “law and order” against Kurdish terrorists. The Serbian regime uses precisely the same logic: that it has only slaughtered people and burnt villages to the ground in a war against Kosovar terrorism.

Within the past month 10,000 people were killed in a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are countless refugees. When did we hear about this on the TV News? Where are the calls from those incorrigible humanitarians, Albright and Cook, to send aid to these refugees and to stop the fighting? Since 1994 820,000 have died in Rwanda. Since 1986 a million and a half have died in Sudan. Where was CNN?  

What about East Timor? Conduct a simple experiment. Go on to the streets of Kansas City or, for that matter, White City in London and ask people what they think about the slaughter of the Timorese people. Most will never have heard about East Timor. The propagandists have forgotten to tell them about that atrocity because that one is a NATO-armed assault on a defenceless minority. East Timor was taken over by Indonesia in 1975, since when one third of its population has been killed—that’s 200,000 people. Since 1975 the USA has sold over $1 billion of weapons to the Indonesian dictatorship. The other main arms suppliers are Australia and Britain. Just as the NATO troops were whizzing off to knock the shit out of Belgrade, Indonesian militia entered a church full of people in East Timor and slaughtered them. Reports have not made it on to the CNN News, perhaps because the reporters are too busy congratulating the West upon its humanitarian campaign to help oppressed minorities.

There is something deeply disgusting about the pretence that bombing is a civilising mission. The people who drop bombs from the sky upon towns and villages are bullying cowards and deserve no respect from anyone. The people who give them the orders to drop their bombs are self-serving hypocrites whose concern for the safety of Kosovar refugees is about as genuine as their domestic concern for single mothers, the unemployed and the disabled. The minority who own and control the world—the Directors of USA Inc and UK Plc—are ruthless, exploitative thieves whose primary interest is in the fast buck and protecting what they imagine their interests to be. The capitalists have never gone to war to promote justice and they never will. Indeed, the notion that justice can be furthered by violence can only make sense when you have a social system that is rooted in violence and plunder.

We will no doubt be told that by opposing the military escapades of Clinton and Blair we are siding with those who are committing unspeakable acts against defenceless Kosovars. Socialists side with no state, for all states are merely organised forces of national coercion. We are opposed to the lot of them and support the interest of the oppressed, not selectively, but wherever they are. In time of war we refuse steadfastly to be deluded by the crass propaganda of any section of the ruling class or to become entrapped in the rhetoric of militarist terror.

Instead of taking sides between this nation or that, we oppose all nationalism. Workers have no country. None to live for. None to die for. Workers should refuse to fight, for every drop of working-class blood shed in battles within capitalism is wasted.  

CNN’s viewing figures have gone up since the war in Yugoslavia started. What exciting pictures the explosions make. What a terrific diversion from thinking about the poverty of life under the profit system it is for wage slaves to be presented with 24-hour live coverage of Clinton’s Heroes. CLOBBER SLOBBA, says the Sun, ever eager to find new depths of banality, illiteracy and tastelessness by which to woo its prey. So, we sit at home and we watch the war and just occasionally we might wonder how much it cost to build the US bomber planes (more than the total GDP of Albania, as it happens) and what kind of world we might live in if those resources were not used to produce ever more sophisticated weapons of death, but libraries, homes and hospitals for all.

Steve Coleman

Elections in North East England (1999)

Party News from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard 

We are standing two candidates in the 6 May local elections in the North East, in Primrose ward of South Tyneside Metropolitan Council and in Deneside ward of Easington District and Seaham Town councils. Further details from the North East Branch Secretary.

The North East branch will also be contesting the European elections on 10 June. A full list will be presented in the 4-member North East Election Region. The Socialist list is: John Bissett, Steve Colborn, Stephen Davidson, Andy Pitts. It is planned to have over a million leaflets distributed to households in the area.

State and class in pre-colonial West Africa (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Was the state instituted for mutual protection or did it arise when society became divided into classes?

Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers had written extensively on the concept of the state. In the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the government. The alternative, called by Hobbes the state of nature, was a thoroughly unpleasant life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

This, according to Hobbes, the state emerged to improve mankind’s lot. However, Engels, summing up his historical analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the State was a product of class society: “It is an admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.” As if to echo Engels, Marx pointed out that the state could not have arisen, let alone maintained itself, had it been possible to reconcile classes. According to Marx the state is an instrument of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.

Marx revealed that a definite level of development of labour productivity is essential before there is real opportunity for humans to exploit other humans. If people produce only the minimum of products required to maintain their physical existence and reproduction, any systematic appropriation of someone else’s labour is out of the question. The opportunity to appropriate someone else’s labour appears only when the productive forces have developed to the level at which the quantity of goods produced somewhat exceeds the minimum required to maintain the direct producers’ lives. The question then arises: Did Africa’s labour productivity reach a level that provided the opportunity for humans to exploit their fellow human beings? The answer is both no and yes. The appropriate answer to this question would enable us to determine the original of the state in pre-colonial Africa.

But it would be absurd to think of only the level of productive forces without the relations of production. Productive forces cannot be developed in a vacuum. People produce them jointly—in groups rather than on their own. People’s relationship to the means of production determine their position and place in the production and the mode of distribution of the products. Where one group of people makes its living by appropriating the labour of the other, then society is divided into the exploiter and exploited. The need to maintain this vampiric relationship of production leads to the rise of an apparatus of coercion and conditioning to systematically brainwash the exploited into accepting their exploitation as a normal condition of life or to crush their resistance.

Before private ownership

If this analysis of state and class is anything to go by then one cannot authentically talk of the state among some of the communities in Ghana before the 14th century. The predominant principle of social relations was that of the family and kinship associated with communalism. Among the Gur social groups in the Upper East Region of Ghana, for example, every member of the society had their position defined in terms of their relationship with their mother’s or father’s family. Leadership was based on religious ties to the Tindana, or custodian of the land, who ran the affairs of the people with a committee of elders chosen from all the families and clans of the territory. This committee administered land, the major means of production not as its personal property, but as the property of all the people in Gurum-Tinga (Gur land) who had the right to till it. Hunting, fishing and grazing grounds for animals were organised in a similar manner. No-one starved whilst others stuffed themselves with food and threw the excess away or sold it for profit. The basic economic law was that of providing the members of society with the necessary means of subsistence through communal ownership of the means of production. The absence of private property in the means of production, of the division into classes and the exploitation of man by man excluded the need for a state. Production was essentially of use values; and there was no alienation of the producer from his means of production.

The fundamental flaw in the social organisation of the Gur however was that the position of the Tindana was supposedly sanctioned by the gods, and therefore permanent. This notion also applied to the elders of families and clans who served in the committee of elders. Only death could loosen their grip on authority. This meant that people occupying positions of trust could use their positions for personal gain, taking a significant share of communal property and becoming rich; indeed vestiges of private ownership of property began to rear its ugly head in the Gur community around the 16th century. However this development did not reach its fullest maturity before the violent intrusion of British colonial rule. To a very large extent, this explained why the British colonial government had to create chiefs in Gur land and use them as instruments of its policy of exploitation and dehumanisation.

It is also important to note that once African societies began to expand by internal evolution, and the instruments of labour were perfected, people obtained more means of subsistence than was essential for their survival. The restricted nature of communal property and the egalitarian distribution of products of labour that characterised people such as the Gur acted as a drag on the further development of the productive forces. The need for joint labour disappeared with the appearance of sickles, iron-tipped hoes, spears and arrows. What this meant was that the possibility of individual labour also emerged. But individual labour brought about private ownership, private ownership brought about inequality between the people; and rich and poor people emerged. In the Mali empire, for example, the dominant mode of production was feudalism even though the communal and slave modes of production had not completely died out. By the end of the 15th century there were both chattel and domestic slaves in Mali comparable to the feudal serfs in Europe. In Senegal Portuguese traders also found that there were elements in the population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency.

A cursory look at the socio-economic and political scene in Africa before colonisation does not reveal one dominant mode of production. Also it is not easy to compartmentalise the socio-economic formations and arrange them in a sequence as some writers do, because the social and economic terrain reveals considerable unevenness in development. There were social formations representing hunting bands, communalism, feudalism while other formations represented a mixture of these. It was upon these that colonialism was superimposed.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Letters: Not my war (1999)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not my war

Dear Editors,

Like you I am opposed to dropping bombs on my fellow human beings. My “side” is opposed to the “sides” of Milosovic, the KLF and the NATO powers, including “our” government. My “side” is for peace and live and let live against power politics, territorial urges and militaristic posturing.

Having no shares or property to defend, I give all Tommies permission to take it easy and stay at home with their wives and bairns. The airmen and soldiers are victims too of a cynical, greedy two-faced hypocritical bunch of warmongers.

If war is ever “necessary” this should proceed by the politicians heading the column into battle.

Robert J. Taylor,  

South Shields 

We have a dream

Dear Editors,

We have a dream, it’s a big one too. Our dream embraces the whole of humanity and they don’t come much bigger than that. In our dream we see every person on the face of the Earth having the same value, priceless! In our dream gone will be the days where one person’s life will be considered more valuable or less valuable than any other. Gone will be the days when someone will be paid as much for reading the News for a day as a nurse will receive for a whole year of looking after the sick. Gone also will be the days when some have a life of untold luxury, wealth and privilege just because they happen to be born in a certain bed.

We have a dream . . . in a socialist world buildings will be built to the highest possible specification (just like banks are now) to be inhabited by people and not to house lumps of gold, bits of coloured glass and pretty pieces of paper. We don’t know how long it might be before our dream becomes a reality, it might take quite a while. We realise that there are plenty of people who have a vested interest in retaining the demeaning values upon which society is based . . . for the time being they are doing alright thank you, Jack.

Capitalism is a reality, but the dream that once was, for too many, has now become a soul-destroying nightmare. One million people in this country alone take a daily dose of Prozac (anti-depressant) to help them get through each day. This is a legal drug, just imagine how many more are getting away from it all by “fixing” on anything that they can lay their shaking hands on.

The fact is of course that capitalism has and continues to fail people in their millions, they see no hope, they have no hope, worse still they don’t even have a dream.

John Phazey, 

Sutton Coldfield

 

Labour no good

Dear Editors,

Re your article “What’s New about New Labour?” (March, Socialist Standard), it is of course, perfectly true that (so-called) “New” Labour is no different from Old Labour. The Labour Party never was a socialist party. Over the years it has had many far left hot-heads in it; one of the most notable being Aneurin Bevan (although, towards the end of his life, he mellowed considerably). The Labour Party in its policies was only really a left-wing conservative party. That is why, in my opinion, it has spent most of the years of its existence in opposition.

When in government, it has introduced means testing for the for the very poor, cut dole money, introduced a compulsory two years’ national service for all young men on attaining the age of 18, banned strikes making them illegal, operated wage freezes, limited wage increases. True, they introduced child benefit after the war; but, in old money, Hugh Dalton, then Chancellor, put a shilling on 20 fags and sixpence on 10 fags to pay for it. The aforementioned policies seem more like the policies of a far right Thatcherite party than a so-called Labour Party.

One of the first assertions in the Labour Constitution was: “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party”. It wasn’t and never has been. But the one that always amuses me sadly is the old Clause 4: “To secure for the workers by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their labour and the most equitable distribution thereof.” Jolly decent of them eh! Who was anyone to deny the workers by hand or brain the full fruits of their labour?

I always remember in the long ago, November 1956 to be exact, as a young engineering apprentice in the Ford Motor company, I was invited to join the AEU. I had to fill in a form and attend the branch I had chosen with my seconder who had joined me. The new recruits stood out at the front of the meeting and the Branch Chairman read a text out to them (I suppose they still have it). The first part of the text had in it: “Our ancestors and predecessors were vilified and persecuted and, what prosperity we have now, is the fruits of their labour.”

Most of the text, however, has faded from my memory. The part I do remember is the end part: “May you live to see the day when we have ended the system that causes unemployment, that causes poverty in the midst of plenty, and replace it with a just and equitable one.” In the intervening years, particularly during the Thatcher years, my thoughts have often gone back to that far-off night. Would I ever live to see that day?

Stuart P. King, 

Romford, Essex 

Become a socialist

Dear Editors,

I think that most folks have heard of Socialism but I doubt very much that their definition coincides with mine—a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community—a world-wide community of 5½ billion of us humans.

We Socialists are quite satisfied that the only way to achieve this goal is by political action. Use your vote to bring about an end to the present system, capitalism, which deprives the worker of the wealth they alone produce.

The solution to most of the ills of the world is a simple one, establish Socialism. However it cannot be done without a majority of Socialists. Our socialist candidates will flat-out tell you that they don’t want your vote unless you want socialism. Reforming capitalism is not on the agenda. Our political opponents have been doing that for over 200 years.

The socialist can point the way but they will not adopt the role of “leader”. Have you heard this before? “Where there are leaders there are led, where there are led there are bled.”

We must first cast off the role of being a follower. You may think you cannot be hoodwinked. That you are extremely intelligent. That you are too wise in the ways of the world. The facts prove otherwise. You have voted for the Whigs and Tories, the Democrats and Republicans, the Liberals and Conservatives for the past 200 years. These are facts. Let us face it: you have been misled year after year. Your “leaders”, with their smooth talk and promises, have proven that followers are made to be bled. Become a Socialist and learn how this capitalist system operates and why it cannot function in the workers’ interests.

Bill Hewitson,  

Santa Monica, California

Living in a Free Society – a recent experience (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is offered without comment. It tries as honestly and comprehensively as possible to offer an objective account of the events surrounding an invitation to appear on a television discussion programme earlier this year.

A couple of months ago I was invited to take part as a representative of the Socialist Party in a Kilroy programme about Jack Straw’s “three strikes and you’re out” policy for burglars.

Two days before the programme was due to be recorded I was telephoned by a research assistant who wanted to know what kind of thing I would like to say. I offered two thoughts. One, a tactical objection to dispensing with juries, and thus with the whole idea of tying justice to particular circumstances—not least the personal circumstances of the criminal. And two, an objection to a discussion about burglary which failed to acknowledge that society was based on the legalised exploitation of one class by another.

The researcher wanted to know more about the latter point, so I offered a brief summary of the Socialist Party’s position. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure about that. You have to remember that our viewers are very ordinary people. I think they would find that very difficult. I certainly do.” I suggested that the ideas were not so much difficult as novel, and offered the opinion that having been invited onto the programme as a representative of the Socialist Party, I would expect to have an opportunity of putting our case. The researcher was unhappy and suggested that I come as an individual and make only the first point. I observed that I thought it ironic that the programme would be discussing the automatic imprisonment of individuals and here she was telling me that I was also to be imprisoned: I wouldn’t be allowed to say what I wanted, only what she wanted me to say. I wondered whether when members of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties were invited to appear on the programme they, too, were told that they wouldn’t be given an opportunity of putting their parties’ cases? The researcher didn’t answer, but withdrew her invitation to me to attend.

Michael Gill

Bombing for peace—the real crisis in NATO (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Western liberals are in a flap about NATO’s bombardment of Serbia. Whichever position they take appears to condone violence against somebody, and the shallowness of liberal thinking has never been more cruelly exposed than now. Yet the cynics are having trouble too, because they can’t see an economic motive behind NATO’s actions, and nobody can believe that the West would spend £2 billion on a purely humanitarian exercise when it didn’t show the slightest concern over East Timor, Rwanda or any other killing ground of recent years.

It’s easy to see the economic value of Kosovo to Milosevic, but what’s in it for NATO? The West don’t seem to be after land or resources in the area, and is facing a huge bill for its pains. So is NATO really a cuddly philanthropic defender of the weak?

Wars, though generic to capitalism, do in fact interrupt the process of wealth accumulation and are frequently against the interests of large sections of the capitalist class, who will therefore try to prevent them. You can’t make money when some gangsters are shooting up your casino. Hence capitalism’s need for an international police force. But as with a domestic police force, the willingness of populations to accept law enforcers whose main concern is private property and money-making depends on those enforcers also preventing other types of crime, like mugging, rape, murder and street violence, which don’t directly concern the owning class but which worry the hell out of the rest of us. If the police couldn’t prevent a gang war on your doorstep you’d start wondering why you bothered respecting the law yourself. And when the law breaks down, the looting starts.

At the heart of this crisis is the problem of credibility, not only for NATO in its efforts to keep the peace, but for the Western Liberal Democracy model of capitalism. This is more serious than it sounds. Capitalism, as everyone knows, requires majority support and participation. Now you can enforce this support the hard way, by having a police state with heavy duty surveillance, martial law, “disappearances”, 24-hour border patrols and a huge state propaganda machine. This is the 1984 approach of George Orwell, but there are severe practical problems, because such a system is incredibly expensive to maintain and, being so crude, unable to get the best out of its workers. The collapse of state capitalism in Eastern Europe had long been predicted by the Socialist Party for these very reasons (although it lasted much longer than we expected).

The other way to ensure support is much cheaper, more efficient, more stable, and more user-friendly. It is called Liberal Democracy. Nobody is going to rebel if they believe that they are already free, and this belief is central to the West’s perception of itself. Consequently the capitalist class is obliged to tolerate a (semi-) free press, the vote, and open criticism of itself, because there has to be evidence of this “freedom” for all to see. And there are other costs. We will not co-operate unless capitalism supplies us with a reasonable safe and secure environment. The police rule by popular consent, and could not rule otherwise. Employment has to be supplied, or else a dole, otherwise food riots will ensue. 

 

The credibility of “Western democratic capitalism” is in bad shape, even for Westerners. We are better informed than we’ve ever been, and we are not impressed by what we see. Nobody believes in leaders like they used to. Nobody doffs their cap to their local MP as they once did. We are accustomed to think of them as generally useless and usually corrupt. Governments, we realise, don’t really care a damn about us except for that little X once every five years or so. Thirty percent of the population doesn’t even bother to give them that.

After the pyramid-selling fiascos in Albania a couple of years ago, capitalism in the region has a poor public image. Millions in Eastern Europe were hoping it was going to be better than Leninist state-capitalism but the bread queues are still there and instead of the secret police they now have the Mafia, that ultimate expression of the free market. If it now appears that NATO, the international Police Department, can’t even stop some tinpot dictator from murdering his way to power, the capitalist hold over workers’ minds will be weakened. We will begin to see through their cosy propaganda and their self-serving laws that nobody else obeys anyway. We might turn back to fascism. But what is worse, we might go forward to socialism. There are no bars on our windows, thanks to the money-saving logic of capitalism. There is only our belief in the system that prevents us acting, and that is increasingly under strain.

Paddy Shannon

Profit or the environment? (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1992 sixteen hundred scientists warned that humanity was on course for a collision with nature. They predicted an environmental crisis by the year 2020 unless humankind could achieve a change in the nature of its “stewardship” of the environment. While there is much uncertainty about the extent to which humans are “irretrievably mutilating” the Earth, as these scientists claimed, it is clear that radical change is needed.

At present “stewardship” over the Earth is in the hands of a small minority of the world population. Their interests often prove to be irreconcilable with the need to protect the environment from pollution and degradation. Awareness of the damage being done has increased markedly over the last two decades. A growth of pressure groups, non-governmental organisations and international conferences, reports and legislation have at least provided us with ever more information, if little else. Indeed, ever since the first international conference on the environment in Stockholm 1971, there has been no shortage of well-intentioned statements of principle from governments. For example, the Stockholm Declaration stated that:

“Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.”

In 1987 the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, called for the development of productive activities to become “‘sustainable’, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It goes without saying that most of us would favour these goals of protecting the Earth’s resources for future generations and preserving the quality of our environment. The question is whether they have any chance of being achieved within a social system where profits come first.

Documents such as the 1987 Brundtland Report and 1992 Agenda 21 which followed the highly publicised Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro do not acknowledge that there is any necessary conflict between making profit and protecting the environment. The goal of “sustainable development” is seen as achievable within the market system. There is no acknowledgement of any conflict between the two supposedly complementary goals.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation have stated that: “The objective is to create an economic environment in which it is more profitable to conserve resources than destroy them” (Long Term Strategy for the Food and Agricultural Sector, FAO Publications).

Again, conservation and profitability are seen as being compatible. Yet experience has shown time and again that these two gaols are incompatible. Only by replacing the profit system with truly democratic organisation can we give the environment the priority it deserves.

Dan Greenwood

Global rollback (1999)

Book Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dark Victory, The United States and Global Poverty. New edition by Walden Bello with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau, Foreword by Susan George, Pluto Press, 1999 (paperback 162 pages)

Socialists should be grateful to Food First and the Transnational Institute for bringing out a revised edition of their handy little book detailing the extent of global poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and war. We do not have the resources to do the desk research to compile all these detailed facts and figures, or to send photographers out to take pictures of destitute people picking over rubbish dumps or police firing on protesters. The authors are enlightened enough to see that capitalism is the culprit, making their analyses useful, without drastic re-interpretation, for the work of presenting the Socialist Party’s critique of capitalism and the socialist alternative. Our argument does not change essentially from year to year, but it is important that we relate it to the world situation as others see it.

The central message of the book, which accords with our case, is that political and social changes that seem to benefit the majority only happen if they advance capitalist interests, and are dismantled willy-nilly when those interests change. The particular scenario focused on is what the authors call the “global rollback” of advances in economic development in the South, and the New Deal and the Welfare State in the North, so that corporate America shall enjoy sources of cheap raw materials and labour, and not be threatened by competition from Japan and the Newly Industrialising Nations.

Having with “relentless scholarship . . . crisply laid out” (Susan George in the Foreword) the disastrous consequences of US capital’s “dark victory”, the writers eventually get around to considering how the world is ever going to recover from this. There is an encouraging paragraph headed “The Role of Working-Class Solidarity” which states that “the globalization of production . . . has brought home to workers in both North and South . . . their common subjugation to the capitalist calculus of short-term profitability”. If such an advance in majority consciousness were really what has happened, socialists would be tremendously excited, but later this is referred to as merely “glimmers of hope on the labor front”. Pious hopes are expressed in “the power of the conviction that human rights, peace, and environmental welfare are indivisible and transcend the . . . limits set by corporate capital in the name of ‘national sovereignty’ when it suits its objectives”. One is reminded of the high-sounding verbiage produced by one of the many conferences of pressure groups, charities etc.

It is not until the final chapter, an Epilogue focused on “the Asian Economic Implosion”, that anything resembling a solution to the world’s problems is put forward. The writers declare that “the state must be reformed along the lines of more transparency, more accountability, and more democratic surveillance of government, but the aim of this enterprise is not to banish it as an economic agent but to enable it to more effectively regulate the market”. They go on to say: “What is being advanced here is not just the reform of the state but the transformation of the economic regime. While market and state must continue to play a vital role, the fundamental mechanism of production, distribution, and exchange . . . must be democratic decision making by communities, civic organisations, and people’s movements”. Why the capitalist class and their political servants should consent to handing over the reins to this well-meaning coalition is not made clear. Given the degree of worker solidarity and understanding the authors believe exists in the world today, how much simpler and easier to just get rid of the capitalist mess altogether and bring in a socialist society.

Chris Marsh

Nationalism (1999)

Book Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagining Nations, Geoffrey Cubitt ed., Manchester University Press.

Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question by Michael Lõwy, Pluto Press.

Two very different books on nationalism. The Cubitt volume is much more “academic”, looking at a number of different issues within the area of nationalism. The best thing that can be said about it is that most of the contributors are aware that nations are not in any way natural entities but are products of history. There are a couple of interesting papers, one on the origins of the Ordnance Survey and one on the way that banknotes are used to display patriotic messages, but most of the contents are too dry to repay the reader’s time.

Lõwy’s book, which examines the writings of Marx and others on nationalism, is more worthwhile, though it contains a number of contradictions. Lõwy is aware that Socialism means a classless, stateless society, but when it comes to the question of whether nations could have any role in Socialism, he wants to have it both ways. At one point he endorses the view that Socialism will be a world without frontiers, with no political delimitation of peoples. Yet a few pages later he seems to accept that Socialism would involve the abolition of national antagonisms but could retain nations with cultural differences. In fact, a true understanding of the implications of Socialism will reveal that the very idea of nations, a political concept, can have no part to play, though there will of course still be cultural differences among people (e.g. language).

While he pays lip service to opposing nationalism, Lõwy also advocates the “right of self-determination” of the Kurds and the Albanians of Kosovo, among others. This is largely based on the Leninist-inspired distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors (always bad) and the nationalism of the oppressed (allegedly worth supporting, even if critically). This even though he is aware that oppressed nations, once “free”, can easily become oppressors in turn. Oppression, however, has to be seen in class, not national terms. Both so-called oppressor and oppressed nations consist of oppressor and oppressed classes, and “national liberation” enables an oppressor class to consolidate and expand its power, rather than freeing all the people of a formerly oppressed nation.

It contains some interesting observations, but on the whole Lõwy’s book swallows too much leftist nonsense to be recommended.

Paul Bennett

Much ado about nothing (1999)

Book Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Jesus Myth by G. A. Wells, Open Court, Chicago, 1999.

Christianity is patently untrue. Its basic premise—that an all-powerful god who had created the universe caused a virgin to have a son by him who became a religious preacher and miracle-worker in an obscure border area of the Roman empire, was killed and then rose from the dead and eventually ascended into the sky and disappeared—is not only ridiculous but also biologically and physically impossible. It just never happened.

But was there even ever a historical person called Jesus? Opinion, even amongst anti-Christians, has been divided. So what is the evidence? The only evidence that we have is the Christians’ holy book which they call the New Testament. This does have some value as a contemporary document. Part of it—Paul’s letters (those he wrote himself)—was written in the middle of the first century, i.e. shortly after Jesus was said to have lived. The other part—the accounts of his life and death known as the “gospels”—was written towards the end of the same century, i.e. about fifty or so years after he was said to have died. However, as Wells emphasises in his new book, there are two problems.

First, Paul, who wrote nearest to the alleged events, says nothing about the life of Jesus; he was only interested in his death or, rather, in his supposed resurrection. This in itself is suspicious. Paul was a Jew, not from the core Jewish area in Palestine but from Tarsus, a town now in southern Turkey, and his main language was Greek not the Aramaic which Jesus and his original followers would have spoken. As a Hellenistic Jew he was influenced by Greek religious ideas, in particular that of a saviour-god; a god who died to save his followers and then later rose from the dead, as for instance Dionysus was believed to do by his followers. In other words, Paul saw Christianity as a saviour-god religion in which a divine figure called Jesus (a name which in Hebrew is linked to the idea of being “saved”) died to save those prepared to follow him. Paul did retain some Jewish ideas: that of an Old Testament character called Wisdom (who he believed Jesus to have been before he was born) and the apocalyptic view that the end of the world was nigh.

Second, while the “gospels” do claim to tell us about the life of Jesus, the trouble is that nearly every event in his life is paralleled either in Greek mythology (virgin birth, resurrection) or, particularly, in the lives of Old Testament figures who also walked on water, fed thousands, raised the dead, rode on asses and ascended into heaven on a cloud (Jesus does, however, seem to have been unique in walking through walls). It is clear that the authors invented a life for Jesus which corresponded to Old Testament traditions and predictions. Even the account of his death is not trustworthy. As a saviour-god he had to die a particularly humiliating death, which at the time was crucifixion but, as only the Roman authorities could carry out this punishment, he had to be made to be condemned by them.

When all this crap has been cleared away, what’s left? Nothing, say those who claim that Jesus was an invented, mythological character who never had any historical existence. Not much, say the others. Only that there was somebody called Jesus who preached that the Jews should reform their ways as the end of the world was nigh and perhaps healed a few cases of people suffering from psychosomatic illnesses, in Galilee in the first part of the first century.

Wells, who in his earlier books such as Did Jesus Exist? (1975) and The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982), had embraced the Jesus-is-pure-myth theory (see correspondence in April 1980 Socialist Standard) has now in this and his last previous book, The Jesus Legend (1996), come round to the view that the Jesus story “may derive ultimately from the life of a first century itinerant Galilean preacher; but to separate out such authentic material from the mass of unhistorical narratives is a well-nigh hopeless task”.

Adam Buick

Broadcasting: A Counterfeit Reality (1999)

Theatre Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Talk of the City by Stephen Poliakoff. Royal Shakespeare Company at the Young Vic.

I find myself writing this review of Stephen Poliakoff’s rich and revealing play about censorship in the BBC in the years before World War II, the day after the NATO announcement that it viewed the content of Serbian television as so much propaganda. It is also only two days since a correspondent to the Guardian noted that whilst letters to the paper have been full of various opinions about the bombing of Serbia, no such differences of opinion have been evident in radio and television broadcasts. And, coincidentally, it’s a couple of months since an invitation to appear on the Kilroy programme was withdrawn because I wouldn’t express opinions in line with the wishes of the production team. All of which remind me of a couple of quotations which I noted when I was reading the Open University unit, “Science, Technology and Everyday Life, 1870-1950”, a couple of years ago:

“The so-called ‘mass media’ serve to generate consent in their audiences by representing the real world in ways which confer legitimacy on the social order in which they subsist.” “Communication is not only about who is talking to whom, and how; it is also about who is not talking to whom and why.”

Talk of the City is a zippy, immediately accessible show which is played with great exuberance and panache by a talented cast. It offers us review host, Robbie, inclined like most comedians to embroider his material in the light of his feelings and creative impulses at the time of delivery, and who is forever in trouble with those who produce his show and would have him never depart from the script; ideas man, Clive, anxious to offer listeners an account of what is happening to the Jews in Germany in 1938, contrary to the covertly anti-semitic line of many BBC managers; and a retinue of BBC officials sensitive to government policy, anxious to tow the party line, who insist on approving every last word before it is voiced over the airways.

The programme contains the complete text of the play and foreword, “Some Background Material—BBC in the Thirties”, which offers about a dozen quotations from internal memos, the BBC house magazine, ex-employees, etc. a real snip at £2.50. Two quotations give the flavour of the culture of the Corporation in the mid- to late-1930s:

“I really believe that they (BBC managers) really thought that everybody who was doing a productive job was necessarily childish and irresponsible and needed controlling” (Maurice Chapman). “I received a letter from the Northern Regional Studio, asking me if I would talk on Repertory Theatre while I was up North. I said I would. I was then informed that a copy of my talk must be in the hands of the BBC at least a fortnight before the date of broadcasting, and that I must go to the studio to rehearse. ‘Otherwise,’ I was told, ‘the project must be abandoned.’ ‘The Project,’ I replied at once, ‘is abandoned'” (JB Priestley).

Nowadays, however, censorship is managed more subtly. Recording programmes in advance and enquiring of those who plan to take part what they might wish to say, can be used to avoid “unsuitable material” being transmitted over the airways. [My own recent personal experience is instructive, and is reported elsewhere in this issue.]

Talk of the City is a splendidly lucid piece of adult theatre, but it is also arguably historically and culturally adrift. By failing to connect with today’s media and avoiding a more substantial critique of broadcasting, Poliakoff seems to be inviting audiences to see the events of the late 1930s as an unique series of events. Socialists, however, would see them as representative of the continuing control of the cultural and political agenda by agents of the capitalist class who wish, as the Open University quotation has it, “to confer legitimacy on the social order in which they exist”.

Michael Gill

Welsh Assembly (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could the Welsh Assembly be the most important thing that has ever happened to Wales? Brian Walters, writing in the South Wales Evening Post (4 March) suggested it will have a profound effect on our lives since it will have the power to decide what happens to education, health, transport and others.

There seems to be an implication here that decisions on such matters are not already being taken or at least that the decisions will be radically different under the Assembly.

But in the same article, Walters pointed out all the Assembly will be doing is taking over the powers that the Secretary of State for Wales now has. And is there any evidence these powers will be exercised in a fundamentally different way? Or will the Assembly authorities continue to suffer the financial and market constraints any administration anywhere faces? And what about the example of the Republic of Ireland, where all the problems present elsewhere in the British Isles—and sometimes in exacerbated form—have continued after more than 70 years not just of devolution but of independence?

What kind of problems are these? They are the usual ones facing all wage earners in Wales as elsewhere—to do with jobs and job security, housing, health, schooling, violence and general worry about the future. They arise not from particular political or constitutional arrangements but from the way society is organised—on the basis of production for profit and minority ownership of the vast majority of the wealth.

The fact is that even if the new Assembly were to bring decisions closer to home, these decisions would still have to be taken in the overall interests of the profit system. This will happen whichever party happens to win power.

Even if dissatisfaction with this eventually led to a fully independent Wales, such decisions would still be taken on the same basis—only by rulers from Cardiff, not London. The position of wage earners would be the same—it makes no difference where the government which administers the profit system has its headquarters.

So despite all the fuss the Assembly is an irrelevance. It will not give the people of Wales more control over their own affairs. The only change that will do that is a change in the whole social system, replacing competitive production for profit and minority ownership by co-operative production. Neither devolution nor an independent Wales or United Britain can achieve this. It is only feasible in a moneyless, frontierless society which, for those with vision, is the next stage in human social evolution.

Swansea Branch

50 Years Ago: Mr. Attlee on Working and Shirking (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although the booklet “National Income and Expenditure” is published by Mr. Attlee’s government, it would seem that he has not read it. Under the heading “Income from Property” it shows that in 1948 the amount of income that went to receivers of rent, dividends and interest (before deduction of tax) was £1,479,000,000: in spite of which Mr. Attlee in a speech at Glasgow on April 10th referred to the receivers of property income in the past tense, as if they have ceased to exist. The following extract is from a report of his speech published by the Manchester Guardian (11/4/49):

“I stress . . . the duty of the citizen of the State as much as his rights. Everyone who fails to contribute his fair share is as much a parasite as those who used to live on the backs of the people scrounging on his mates. If a section of the workers make use of a key position to do little work and extract disproportionate wages they are just as much exploiters as the property-owners who used to hold the nation to ransom. They are acting anti-socially.”

This is a foretaste of what will be said by the Labour Ministers when eventually their attempt to improve capitalism collapses. They will blame it all on the workers.

(From Socialist Standard, May 1949)

The Choice is Yours: More of the Same or an End to the Profit System? (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

These European elections will be the last major elections of the twentieth century, the last chance this millennium for us, the working class, to vote for ourselves for a change.

So what are the choices?

Firstly, you could vote for more of the same. The same old leaders, with the same old lies, promising everything, delivering nothing. You could vote for more unemployment and poverty, more stress and anxiety for yourself and in future for your children. For the continued threat to the environment and the planet we live on, for continued global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, and pollution on an unprecedented scale.

You could vote for permanent global economic uncertainty and the threat of economic crises, which are part and parcel of the way society is organised today. A society organised on the basis of profit above all else, profit for a few while the majority have to take their chances on capitalism's roulette wheel. A society that says to us: "No profit, no production", "Can't pay, then can't have".

In Europe alone 20 million people are unemployed, simply because no profit can be made from their labour. Europe, alone, stockpiles millions of tons of food, destroys just as much and also, obscenely, pays farmers not to produce food. While at the same time pensioners in Britain and elsewhere must choose between keeping warm or eating. In the wider world hundreds of millions die of hunger or hunger-related diseases. The rich continue to get richer while the poor steadily get poorer.

If that is what you want, then vote for one of the other parties. Because that is what you will get.

But we do have a choice

We can say "enough is enough!"

The alternative is simple. A society in which the things we need to live are produced directly for human use. Where the means and instruments for producing things are owned in common by us all, not as now by no more than 5% of the population.

What this means specifically is that, quite simply, food will be produced to eat, clothes to wear, and houses to live in, to name but three examples, not as at present for the profit of a few. That production will be on the basis of voluntary co-operation, not the anarchy of competition we have today. As we co-operate to produce the things we need to live, by using the commonly-owned means of production and distribution, so we then take freely of the products of our labour.

No more leaders. The new society will of necessity be a truly democratic society, with decisions which affect us being taken by us. No more national boundaries, but a world-wide society, to replace the outdated system of global capitalism we have at present where production for profit is a hindrance to the fulfilment of human need.

No more classes. A society without employers or employees, haves and have-nots, simply people co-operating on a free and equal basis to produce the things we all need to live. A society where human beings will be able to live in harmony with nature, not like present society where pollution carries on unabated because to deal with it eats into the profits of the few.

These then are the choices:

• Carry on regardless with a society which has not, nor can, solve the problems we face today since they are part and parcel of it. Or we can elect to change things and bring about a society of co-operation not competition. A society of equality not inequality. A society of production to satisfy human need, not to satisfy the drive for profits for a few.
• We in THE SOCIALIST PARTY cannot bring this society about for you, nor are we offering to. Only you can, by working together and acting for yourselves. If there is a majority of people who understand and want this change and work to bring it about then it will happen.

If you agree with us, you can show this by voting for the list presented in these elections by THE SOCIALIST PARTY.

What the papers don't say (1): The tabloids (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month we begin a two-part article on the capitalist press and its relationship to capitalism and capitalist politicians.

Anyone who takes any more than a passing interest in politics will know that the various media play an important part it. In the Top 300 Most Powerful People in England, published by the Observer last year, Rupert Murdoch (a man who does not even live in England), came second after Tony Blair. Anyone who is even remotely aware of the political leanings of the newspapers in Britain will know that the tabloid press had strong Tory leanings from about 1979 to 1992 and are largely now for Labour. As regards the last general election the Sun claimed that it was "The Sun Wot Won it". It is also common wisdom that one should not "believe everything you read in the papers".

So we, the working class, know that the papers are powerful, that they are political, that they deal in distortions of the truth. And yet, the overwhelming majority of us read the tabloid press. So why do we seemingly have an appetite for the lies and distortions of the popular press? Do we realise just how "unfree" our press actually is?

Although it is not the newspapers' job to tell the truth, they are not particularly there to tell lies either (though they do when the occasion demands). They exist, as does anything else in capitalism, to make profits for their owners.

When Murdoch broke the unions in 1986 by moving his entire operation to Wapping overnight, he began to refer to the newspapers of his News International stable as his "cash cows" (Jeremy Tunstall, The New National Press in Britain, p. 26). Piers Morgan, the sometime editor of the News of the World and now the "responsible" editor of the Daily Mirror, explained the situation very clearly: "I only judge a story on what sells and what doesn't" (Guardian, 30 November 1996). It is this element of the media that makes it at one and the same time the capitalists' friend, and also their enemy. The forces that generate the kind of copy we see in Britain and in other national papers around the globe are the same forces which also undermine governments' attempts to censor or to manipulate the media. Try censorship who dares: the media is a savage animal and it can bite your hand off.  

Before the mid-1960s the British press was relatively well behaved (from the point of view of the government). One reason for this was a hangover from the Second World War when newspapers were effectively self-censoring. Another important reason why the press did not attack governments as vitriolically as is the norm today was the widely held belief that in doing so you would inevitably alienate the section of your readership which supported the party you were attacking. Although certain papers have been readily identifiable as having certain leanings for some time, they have always had a significant minority who read the paper whilst voting "the other way".

Brown-nosing

The huge change in this view came when the Murdoch/News International group made the discovery in the 1980s that you could take an extreme anti-Labour stance whilst retaining millions of Labour voters as readers. This was done in a number of ways, such as rationing overt politics to one page of the paper (where the regular reader could avoid it) and by attacking currently unpopular and unsuccessful Tory Ministers. In this respect the Sun was entirely in the pocket of Margaret Thatcher. Larry Lamb was the editor of the Sun during the early Thatcher era, and he was rewarded with a knighthood for his services to Margaret Thatcher during the 1979 election campaign, along with John Junor of the Sunday Express and David English of the Daily Mail. Together, they made sure that pictorial coverage of Margaret Thatcher was six times greater than that of the Prime Minister James Callaghan, and who focused upon her in an increasingly presidential way. In the same way today Tony Blair receives almost ten times more coverage than the Tory leader (has anything to do with Blair's new cosy relationship with Murdoch?).

In the 1980s the tabloids made sure that the uncommitted voter received no informed election coverage. And it was they who generated the much-talked about "Maggie factor".

What happened to Margaret Thatcher was entirely new. Whilst the press had in the past focused upon Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, and especially Winston Churchill during the Second World War, the presidential style of Thatcher's campaign was something entirely new in British politics. Her personal approval rating was always well above that of her party throughout her time in office (excluding the Poll Tax years). Throughout the 1980s the tabloid press went in for constant and consistently noisome brown-nosing which cemented Thatcher in the public mind.

This is not to argue for a kind of press-in-the-pocket-of-the-government conspiracy theory. This is not the case. The press is not necessarily in the pocket of the government; though the way they all climbed into Mrs. Thatcher's handbag in the 80s, and Tony Blair's trousers in the 90s might lead you to suspect otherwise. Recently we have seen how the press can bite the hand that feeds it.

When Thatcher was ousted, her replacement (John Major) was attacked vitriolically by the thenSun political columnist Richard Littlejohn (he is now a dreadful broadcaster). He was ferociously critical of John Major, indeed with the Tory government as a whole. He accused Major of being a political sleepwalker. "When you open your eyes you will find you are Prime Minister", he wrote in December 1992. As keenly as the Tory press brown-nosed to Margaret Thatcher, they attacked John Major.

Here a pattern emerges. We have already identified how the Sun vilified Tory ministers, and glorified Thatcher. Problems with policy, or, as in 1981 deep unpopularity of the government coupled with massive inner-city riots, could be ascribed to incompetent ministers. The glorious leaderine was, of course, untouchable. As a political tactic this is not new; the horrible 20th century of the Cult of the Personality, generally manifests itself in an absolution of the leader regardless of what their administration is doing.

This emphasis upon the individual has been an increasing symptom of the emptiness of capitalist politics. The emptier the politics, the bigger the personalities. It is usually explained by the simple fact that the political grandees are now more often in the limelight, and so need to be more attractive to win votes (the Kennedy factor). It is, of course, true that when the public is faced with a choice of politicians who will make little or no difference to their lives, they will chose the better-looking politician.

If, however, the politician that they were voting for was saying something which was going to make a difference to their lives, then it would not matter whether or not that politician had an ugly mug. We are not saying that Nelson Mandela has an ugly mug, but his face was for many years an almost invisible one. Did it matter what he looked like? Of course not. Opposition to a system which took away basic human rights was such a potent idea, that even as an almost invisible presence he commanded the support of the overwhelming majority of black South-Africans. However, in the absence of real politics people will vote for smooth--Tony Blair is; Michael Foot wasn't.

Political realignment

Although we saw a swing back towards Labour in the tabloids before the last election, the Financial Times had advised the voters to vote Labour the election before that. Senior figures in the world of business were expressing a deep liking for the new Labour Party well before the last election. As has happened in the past, the capitalist class was preparing itself to do business with Labour. They have normally done reasonably well out of Labour governments, and it would appear that the current one is equally "on message" as far as the capitalists are concerned.

The media moguls are, of course, part of this circuit of capitalists who see the way that the wind is blowing and consequently take a new tack. In the newspapers this can manifest itself in a political realignment of a paper. Since the press is not really selling opinions, or thinking through political questions, but selling a product; and that in reality there is no real difference to the capitalist class between Labour and the Conservatives, then such a "realignment" becomes very easy to imagine.

In this respect the broadsheets are different from the tabloids. They rely upon advertising income and not circulation for their revenue; consequently they are more at liberty to put forward their political opinions. However, for the tabloids the picture is much more confused.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun in 1969, the paper (which had previously been the Daily Herald) "voted" Labour. Now it is no secret that Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher enjoyed a great rapport during the 1980s, especially over the way that Murdoch completely destroyed the unions in his move to Wapping in 1986. However, Murdoch had to be persuaded to have his paper "vote" Tory. It was not his liking or otherwise for the Tory party that swung the day (this is neither here nor there for a capitalist like Murdoch). No, what swung the allegiance of the Sun was the fact that of the three competing downmarket tabloids, the Daily Mirror already staked out a firm, partisan pro-Labour line. This left the other two players in the market being - the Daily Star, and the Sun.

Murdoch's rightward swing was simply a matter of market segmentation. In 1979, the Sun "voted" Tory for the very first time, subsequently the Sun executives only had to worry about the Daily Star. (They don't any more). They dealt with the Daily Star, not in the field of political ideas (if the Sun can be credited with any actual ideas), but in the field of bingo, and they trumped all the other tabloids with the most horrifically jingoistic coverage of the Falklands War. (Who can forget: "GOTCHA"?). Politics, war, bingo: it's all the same when you're a capitalist media mogul.

Rupert Murdoch served his apprenticeship in an Australian paper, and he knew that apart from wars and general elections, few political or foreign stories sell extra copies of newspapers. The big exception to this was the Kennedy assassination. So his first task as the owner of the Sun was to get rid of the foreign desk. Now none of the tabloids has any kind of foreign desk, and the mid-market papers have decreased the size of their foreign press contingent significantly.

For the down-market tabloids, the capitalists have decided upon xenophobia as the main structuring element of their foreign coverage. The mid-market papers such as the Daily Mail are less xenophobic but also carry very little non-British news. Please note that at no time has it been suggested that the reading public have no appetite for foreign or political stories: that's untested. The reason why these sections have been removed from the tabloids is that their inclusion does not increase the circulation of the paper. Why pay for expensive foreign correspondents, when you can have an equal number of readers with a staff of gossip columnists and horoscope writers?

Next month we conclude with an examination of the broadsheets.

Jacek Krause