Voice From the Back: The benefits of globalisation (2001)

The Voice From the Back column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The benefits of globalisation

“With a “catastrophe” in the world’s trade and many growers facing starvation, a leading coffee buyer appealed to the International Coffee Organisation in London yesterday for a tax of $1 on a 50kg bag to save farmers . . . “It is a huge and wealthy industry, yet the beans are grown almost entirely by very poor people who receive hardly anything for their labours.” . . . Prices have halved to $75 a bag this year, mainly because of a World Bank-financed drive to plant coffee in Vietnam. Production has risen from 4m bags to 16m. Big firms, including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee, which owns Douwe Egberts, have kept prices up to benefit shareholders while the price to growers has halved.” Guardian (27 September). The rich get richer and the impoverished producers get poorer. Sound familiar? The answer isn’t a $1 tax but the complete transformation of society from one based on production for profit to one based on production solely for use.

Futile reforms

“The recovery of the ozone layer could be delayed significantly because the chemicals produced to replace those banned in the Montreal Protocol are proving equally damaging and are not controlled by international law, the UN Environment Programme reported.” Times (17 October). Another example of how reforms often don’t solve the problems of capitalism and another reason to get rid of it.

Save the children

During October the charity organisation Save The Children mounted a massive publicity drive to raise funds. According to their appeal “Around the world today, one in four children live in poverty – poverty serious enough to blight their lives just as they are beginning. Poverty can leave children without enough food to eat, rob them of the chance to go to school and force them into poorly paid work – vulnerable to adult abuse and exploitation.” How abusive can be gauged by the experience of a nine year old who worked for two years as a sari embroiderer, fell sick, was sent home and was paid nothing for 2 years work. The charity’s solution – send £3 a month! If only these well-meaning people would look beyond the effects of poverty to its cause we might really be able to save the children.

Same old Tories

Anyone who thought that two crushing electoral defeats would change the core policies of the Conservative Party can rest assured that the old Tory Party is sticking by its principles – support the rich against the poor. The columnist Matthew Parris writing in the Times (10 October) on their annual conference illustrated that very well when he observed: “The Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, railed yesterday against a Government he accused of leaving people to die in the queue for heart treatment – and was met with stony silence. Then he scolded the Government for cheating the shareholders of Railtrack – and was greeted by applause.”

Land of the free?

It reads like an Orwell-inspired dystopia, a nightmarish piece of fiction, but it is a recent letter to the editor of a mass circulation magazine. It reveals the frightening mind-set of some workers scared by the World Trade Towers disaster. Capitalism breeds paranoia and xenophobia, but even by capitalism’s standards the following is pretty scary stuff. “Our people must take an active part in the vigilant protection of our country. Civilians must assume roles in our civil defense as block watchers, neighborhood police, campus observers and providers of information to authorities about those who act suspiciously or who voice anti-American opinions.” Patrick Grant, New York City. Time Magazine (15 October).

More waste makers

Many years ago in his book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard wrote about “planned obsolescence”; the artful dodge of manufacturing products that needed to be replaced all the time. Some 40 years later we have the perfect example of this in the music business. Concerned about the misuse and selling on of the latest singles released to music executives for compiling play lists, the ingenious boffins of the music business have come up with a cunning ploy. “Tornado, the distributor of digital media products, has found a way of making Mission Impossible come to life. It has designed a voice recording that self-destructs after it has been played.” Sunday Times (7 October). There is no limit to the ingenuity of capitalism when it comes to protecting profits. Inside socialism, human inventiveness will be used for something more important than Mission Impossible recordings.

Classless society?

In his recent book Almost Like A Whale the geneticist Steve Jones comes up with some figures on land ownership that would seem to contradict those who argue that we live in a classless society where the barriers of ownership have been broken down. “Half the private land in Scotland is owned by three hundred and fifty people (in a country where half the population has no landed property at all); and the greatest proprietor of all, at a quarter of a million acres, is the Duke of Buccleuch. The Duke’s lesser titles include a couple of Earldoms, a Barony or two – and the Lordship of Eskdale”

Pathfinders: Doubleplusungood (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Orwell as can be expected…

The UK science community has been heaving a small sigh of relief lately having suffered less damage than expected from the spending cuts. True, the boffins are facing a funding freeze, keeping their £4.6bn budget at 2010 levels for the next 5 years, meaning a probable cut through inflation of around 10 percent in real terms, however this is as nothing compared to the mass cattle-trucking of scientific projects in the direction of the knacker’s yard that many had expected. But before the techies had even reached for a pipette of champers in celebration they were sobered by the further alarming news that the director general for science and research, the official in charge of that science budget and traditionally from respectable scientific stock, could soon be replaced by a – gasp – civil servant (‘UK research spending decisions set for a shake-up’, New Scientist online, 17 November).

It would be a mystery to anyone who has been following the Orwellian tactics of the Con-Dem Coalition lately why scientists should be shocked at this. Indeed, despite what they may think, they have still got off lightly. It could have been far worse.

A miasma of doublethink pervades the Con-Dem Coalition’s every political pronouncement as they manoeuvre to secure their grubby rich friends every concession while bamboozling their victims into believing that they are the ones getting more ‘freedoms’. Home Secretary Theresa May, for example, has been loudly ridiculing the Equality legislation planned by that silly Harriet Har-person, claiming that inequality somehow makes you free (‘Theresa May scraps equality in the name of fairness’, Guardian, 17 November). The Equality Duty was designed to end decades of legal confusion in which victims of discrimination had virtually no chance of redress against big corporations, and instead to place the responsibility on employers to demonstrate through good practice that they were not discriminating in the workplace, a kind of guilty-until-proved innocent reversal of emphasis. Instead, in a spin of doubletalk, May uses the very failures of the old legislation to argue against any new legislation that might potentially solve the problem. In the name of fairness, the bosses get themselves off the hook and discriminated groups can look forward to having to make all the running to get anyone to listen to them – just as it’s always been. They are free to complain, and the bosses are free to ignore them, which is what the Coalition means by freedom.

 

Similarly emancipated are workers everywhere on medication, as the Government cuts the cojones from the drug regulatory body the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and hands prescription powers entirely to GPs. No longer shall poor old Mrs Jones be denied the £30,000 treatment that might have kept her in miserable pain for an extra six weeks, because that demonic nest of Doctor Deaths at NICE considered it not worth the money – now any GP can prescribe anything! Anything, that is, that their budget can afford and that they can be badgered or bluffed or blackmailed into buying by the omni-present pharmaceutical salesmen. No more Mr NICE Guy, now it’s Mr Market and drugs for whoever can pay the most and shout the loudest.

 

 Best to stay healthy and away from doctors then, but in that case you’ll be taking advice on how to stay healthy from the very businesses which have always devoted so much of their time and your money in making you unhealthy in the first place. With a cynicism that could collapse lungs, the Health Secretary has given up the usual murky practice of consulting with big business behind closed doors before making health policy, and handed the power of policy-making entirely over to the businesses. In what is one of the most blatant displays of English Tea Partyism, and in a broadside designed to de-mast the dreaded Food Standards Agency, Andrew Lansley has set up new ‘responsibility deal’ networks to deal with obesity, alcoholism, exercise, behavioural problems and health and safety at work, in which key consultants are members of Unilever, the Wine and Spirit Trade Organisation, Mars, all big supermarkets and a raft of other commercial interests not famous for their health credentials. In the craven old days, a minister would at least formulate policy first and then run it past these moguls to see what he could get away with. In the galloping gutlessness of the new order, Lansley has simply invited the moguls to come up with their proposals and run them past him, in order to see what he can get past the media. An early casualty of this supine approach has been the abandonment of the simple and easy to understand ‘traffic light’ nutritional coding system in favour of a different system known through studies to be incomprehensible to customers, despite the fact that some supermarkets had already agreed to give the traffic light system a try (‘Good for the nation’s health – or big business?’ Guardian, 13 November).

What next, one wonders? The handing of UK defence policy to the arms industry perhaps. Meanwhile the doublethink redoubles as public sector workers are being liberated from their jobs and told that they have the freedom to take over their former workplaces and run them as ‘John Lewis co-operatives’, after the style of the mutualised department store. Taking the name of this column cruelly in vain Francis Maude, the minister in the Cabinet Office in charge of civil servants, has launched 12 ‘Pathfinder’ initiatives, fledgling public-service but employee-owned mutuals who are the supposed trailblazers for a new era in which all responsibilities formerly borne by the state will now be borne by social workers and health visitors running their own co-ops. As Thatcher gave us ‘right-to-buy’, Maude is giving us ‘right-to-run’, but not everyone is fooled by the spin. As some pundits point out, such co-ops will have a huge uphill struggle, and most will collapse and be eaten up by, yes, you guessed it, the big corporations. And what is so liberating about exposing public services to the free market anyway? wonders Unite General Secretary Tony Woodley: “You go to John Lewis to buy a sofa or a fridge, not to have chemotherapy” (Guardian, 17 November)

In view of these developments, the science community should think itself lucky it’s only getting a civil servant to administer its budget. In a year from now it could be a McDonalds executive. The proof that capitalism is fundamentally not good for healthy science or the science of health is made clearer by the fact that, although government regulation solves none of the basic problems facing science in a money age, the further the drift towards an unregulated free market, the worse it gets for science, as indeed for everyone else.

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: The rich get richer (2005)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rich get richer

"The US's richest tycoons increased their personal wealth in the past year, with the top 400 worth $1.13 trillion (£640bn), says Forbes magazine.... To make this year's list of the top 400 fortunes in the US a minimum net worth of $900m was required — up from $750m last year." (BBC News, 23 September) The old popular song "Aint We Got Fun" cynically stated "The rich get rich and the poor get children", but it is no laughing matter.

Your two cents worth

An analysis of the gap between the rich and poor in Manhattan by Dr Beveridge of the City University of New York is revealing. "Income Disparity in City Matches Namibia. Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about 60 blocks from the Wagner Houses, a public housing project in East Harlem, but they might as well be light years apart. They epitomise the highest and lowest earning tracts in Manhattan, where the disparity between rich and poor is now greater than any county in the country. . . .  The top fifth of earners in Manhattan make 52 times what the lowest fifth make — $365,826 compared with $7,047 — roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia. . . .  Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents." (New York Times, 17 September)

Big Spender

"The minute he walked in the joint, they could tell he was a real big spender. . . .  By the time he left the Aviva bar in the five-star Baglioni Hotel in Kensington,West London, on Thursday night, he had spent nearly £36,000. He bought 851 cocktails, emptied the place of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne, and gave a waitress a £3,000 tip. (Times, 1 October) This hedge fund manager from New York spent £16,500 on champagne and £6,000 on a variety of cocktails. It can be safely assumed this high-roller does not live in the Wagner housing project in East Harlem.

Doublethink

According to George Orwell in 1984, doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. This spectacular mental gymnastic feat seems to have been accomplished by Karen Hughes, a public relations spokesperson for President Bush in her recent trip to the Middle East. Trying to sugar the pill for her Turkish listeners she came out with this classic of Doublespeak. "To preserve peace, sometimes my country believes war is necessary." (Observer, 2 October)

Progressing backwards

Some years ago the press and TV was full of conjecture about the wonderful leisure-based life we would have inside capitalism. Futurologists and other media pundits speculated that with the advance of technology we would all be working fewer hours and fewer days per week. The big problem of the future would be how to spend all our leisure hours. Such scenarios have proven completely wrong with many of us now working longer hours and now it seems probably working for many more years. "The state pension age should be raised to 70, the Confederation of British Industry says in light of new figures detailing extended life expectancy." (Times, 4 October)

The dignity of labour

In an edited extract from Maxwell's Fall: An Insider's Account by Roy Greenslade we learn something of the contempt the owning class feel for the working class. When Maxwell took over The Daily Mirror he wanted to speak to Kelvin MacKenzie then the editor of The Sun but his secretary reported that MacKenzie would not accept his call. "Maxwell demanded that the secretary relate the conversation in full, but she was hesitant. "No, no, no," screamed Maxwell. "Tell me everything he said." She said she would prefer not to, but Maxwell shouted: "You will not get into trouble, Patricia. But if you refuse, you will be in trouble. "Well, Mr Maxwell, he said, "I don't want to speak to the fat Czech bastard." Two weeks later Patricia left in tears, escorted from the building by a security man (Times, 6 October).

The decline of religion

It used to be an argument of supporters of capitalism that socialism was impossible because of the working class's adherence to religion. A recent article by the columnist Magnus Linklater seems to give the lie to that notion. "Whereas in 1851 between 40 and 60 per cent of the population went regularly to church, today that figure is less than 7 per cent. In recent years the trend has accelerated — by 28 per cent in the last 20 years for the Catholic Church, and 24 per cent for the Anglican Church; in Scotland, the fall has been so dramatic that the once all-powerful Kirk reported recently that it could well be extinct as an organisation within the next 50 years." (Times, 13 October) Any other arguments against socialism?

Voice From The Back: The Inequalities Of Capitalism (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Inequalities Of Capitalism

A good example of the class division in modern society can be seen when we look at the wealth of the top 0.1 percent of the population in the USA. “An analysis by David Cay Johnston in the New York Times found that the average annual inflation-adjusted income of this group increased by 2.5 times, to $3 million (£1.6 million), from 1980 to 2002. The average net worth of those on the Forbes 400 list has mushroomed in the past 20 years, rising from $390 million (£206 million) to $2.8 billion (£1.48 billion)” (Times, 17 August).  As for you and your family, “inflation adjusted” how are you doing? A little less than $3 million this year I would imagine.

Pardon Our French

Nothing sums up capitalism better than the article that appeared in the Observer Magazine (27 August) when dealing with the former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party John Bird, who it describes as an entrepreneur. We think this might mean con man but we never went to French classes. This enterprising person may be more familiar to you as the owner of the magazine The Big Issue – yes the one you bought because you felt sorry for the lady outside the bus station.

Here is the owner of that magazine on the homeless and how he feels about it. “Fifty years ago a homeless person wasn’t allowed to sleep rough or beg. They’d get a menial job but they were part of society. Nowadays they pay nothing. They are infantilised. And it costs us £60,000 to keep each one of them in that state.” We must go to French classes. Perhaps entrepreneur really means “arrogant owning class bastard.”

Exploitation

It is a basic premise of socialists that all wealth that is produced inside modern capitalism is the product of the working class and that the capitalist class live off the surplus value that the working class produce. Now we have such pillars of capitalist society as the Observer and Reuters agreeing with us. “The 20 largest quoted companies in the UK make an average of over £96,000 pre-tax profit per employee, according to research carried out by the Observer. … BG, formerly British Gas, made by far the most – approximately £445,000 ..” (Observer, 27 August). Are you understanding these figures? On average your employer cons you out of more than £1,800 a week and in the case of BG over £8,000 a week. Why aren’t you a socialist? Are you a shareholder in BG?

The American Dream

There is a popular misconception about that as the USA is the world’s most developed capitalist country and the most productive the American workers must be well off. A recent report from the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute shows that this is not true.

“Adjusted for inflation, average wages in the US are now lower than they were in 2000 – so the benefits of the rapid increases in productivity . . .  are not being passed to the workers. In fact, as the New York Times reported last week, official figures show that wages and salaries now make up the smallest part of GDP since records began in 1947 . . .  In 1965, CEOs earned 24 times more than the average worker; by 2005 it was 262 times. . . . The top 20 per cent of asset-holders now control 85 per cent of all America’s wealth.” (Observer, 3 September)

Bones of Contention

The National Museum of Kenya is to reopen next year after extensive renovations. It will feature a special exhibit The Origins Of Man which will display the key fossil finds of Africa’s Great Rift Valley – considered by many to be the cradle of humanity. All round celebrations locally, you may imagine. Not a bit of it. “It’s creating a big weapon against Christians that’s killing our faith,” said Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who is leading the hide-the-bones-campaign.” (Observer, 10 September). This individual is chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which claims to represent churches of 35 denominations with 9 million members. No surprise there, he is carrying on the long tradition of Christian suppression of scientific enquiry.

 

Big Brother Is Watching You

George Orwell’s 1984 was a dystopia where every move of the worker was monitored, but Orwell’s nightmare has arrived. “Learn that truth, and learn it well; what you do at work is the boss’s business. Xora and SurfControl are just some of the new technologies that have sprung up in the past two years peddling products and services – software, GPS video and phone surveillance, even investigators – that let managers get to know you really well. The worst mole sits right on your desk. Your computer can be rigged to lock down work files, restrict Web searches and flag e-mailed jokes about the CEO’s wife. ‘Virtually nothing you do at work on your computer can’t be monitored’, says Jeremy Gruber, legal director of the US National Workrights Institute, which advocates work place privacy” (Time, 11 September). The article goes on to quantify how widespread this snooping is. 76 percent of employers watch your use of the Web, 36 percent track the content and time spent on the keyboard. 38 percent hire staff to sift through your e-mail and 38 percent have fired workers over the last 12 months for misuse of the email.

Say What You Mean (2006)

Book Review from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Unspeak’, by Steven Poole. (Little, Brown £9.99)

Which word would best describe those who use violence to oppose the US-UK occupation of Iraq? ‘Terrorists’ is condemnatory, while ‘resistance’ (with its echoes of those who opposed Nazi occupation in Europe) may register approval. Perhaps the most neutral term is ‘insurgents’. This is one of the examples that Steven Poole uses to show that choice of words is important, that the labels attached to people or ideas can affect attitudes towards them.

Socialists are well aware of this, of course, the very word ‘Socialism’ having been dragged through the mud of dictatorship and Labour Party politics. But Poole does have some instructive examples to discuss. For instance, Republicans in the US have been advised to talk about ‘climate change’, rather than ‘global warming’, on the grounds that the former is less frightening.

The UN General Assembly had in fact already used the euphemism of climate change, which does not specify in which direction the change is proceeding, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the US, both which of which have interest in playing down the effects of burning fossil fuels.

Equally, ‘genetically engineered’ has often been replaced by cosier-sounding terms such as ‘genetically modified’ (usually shortened to ‘GM’), ‘genetically enhanced’ and ‘biotechnology foods’. And ‘ethnic cleansing’ sounds so much less nasty than the straightforward ‘genocide’.

In the mealy-mouthed platitudes of capitalism’s apologists, even military operations have to be given nice-looking names. Hence Operation Enduring Freedom (US invasion of Afghanistan) and Operation Just Cause (the invasion of Panama in 1989). The invasion of Iraq was going to be called Operation Iraqi Liberation, till someone realised that the initials spelled OIL!

The ‘war on terror’ is another snappy phrase, one which Poole regards as absurd because you can’t have a war against a tactic or technique. And this ‘war’ has itself given rise to a great many mendacious expressions. Think of ‘extraordinary rendition’, which refers to transporting supposed enemies to countries where they will be tortured: ‘rendering’ is a word used in industrial meat-processing, so perhaps the phrase is not so inaccurate after all.

‘Sleep management’ is what is more honestly known as ‘sleep deprivation’. And ‘abuse’ is used in place of the taboo word ‘torture’, so that the government responsible for torturing prisoners can take refuge in the position that it’s really only subjecting them to abuse.

It needs to be said that the reality of capitalism and its works is what’s really objectionable, not  the names that smell of roses but cover up the filth beneath.

Socialists have always called a spade a spade, not being frightened to expose capitalism and the capitalist class. But Poole’s book is a useful reminder of some of the ways in which defenders of the status quo go about their business.

Paul Bennett

Sting in the Tail: Born in the USA (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Born in the USA

American politicians are fond of boasting that the USA is a classless society. But the truth of the matter is revealed In a Michigan newspaper The Grand Rapids Press (26 April 1990) under the headline "One Child In Five Now Lives In Poverty".

Reporting the National Commission on Children, a group established by Congress and its members appointed by the President and House and Senate leaders, It showed the real position of the working class in the USA.

Malnutrition affects nearly a half-million children, and every night an estimated 100,000 go to sleep homeless —
The poverty rate in 1987, the year the report cited, was 15% for white children but 45% for black children and 39% for Hispanic children.

In the same issue the newspaper reports:

The heirs of Edward Steichen, a pillar of New York's Museum of Modern Art, are battling the museum over an $800,000 painting by Matisse that was bequeathed to the photographer's 6 year old great- grand-daughter.

One kid stands to inherit $800,000 while 20% of US kids suffer official poverty. No class differences In the USA?

Nothing Sacred

The Anglican Church has lost 600,000 members and demolished 289 churches in the last 20 years.

But the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free market 'Think Tank", has come up with a solution. They propose according to The Guardian (16 April 1990) that the clergy be:

. . . paid on a performance basis and regarded as a 10,000 strong sales force established on prime sites throughout Britain.

What the priests would earn would depend on how successfully they could:

. . . go into the highways and byways and compel them (customers) to come in.

In other words, get bums on seats or else. 

Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie had converted, among others, the priests into paid wage-labourers, but even they could hardly have dreamt that one day the priestly wages might be based on piece-work!

Dancing in the Street?

"If Labour Wins" was the title of John Molyneux's article in Socialist Worker for April 17,1990.

He predicts that a Tory defeat at the next general election will see "mass dancing in the streets". So much for the night before but what about the morning after when the new Labour government is faced with "economic crisis"?

Molyneux's prediction is that Labour will "turn on" and "squeeze the working class" because that is "what every Labour government has done when faced with economic crisis" and he provides chapter and verse to prove this.

We can agree with Molyneux's predictions about a future Labour government, but we can do a little predicting of our own: it is that, despite all their denunciations of Labour, Molyneux and the rest of the Socialist Workers Party will be urging workers to put their heads in the noose by voting Labour at the next general election. Any bets?

US Speak

George Orwell in his book, "1984" invented "Newspeak" a language that allowed the ruling elite to describe the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Peace.

According to the report of Time (30 April 1990) Orwell's Newspeak is in full bloom In 1990.

 The Strategic Air Command has decided to change its longtime motto 'Peace Is our Profession", to "War is our Profession - Peace Is our Product".

Boom and Bust

John Ashcroft, ex-chairman of Coloroll, was a stock market darling of the 80's.

And no wonder. Coloroll started the decade as a small wallpaper manufacturer but under Ashcroft's guidance it borrowed heavily to buy companies making glassware, ceramics, textiles, furniture and carpets.

This mad dash for expansion was fine when the economy was booming and interest rates were low, but when they shot skyward then High Street spending plunged and so did Coloroll's profits. Its shares have fallen from a peak of 383p to only 15p.

Now Coloroll's very future is in doubt and Ashcroft joins the long list of financial whlzz-kids who, despite all the evidence, believed that capitalism's booms will last forever.

The Sick Society

The Socialist view that Health, like everything else in a capitalist society, is largely decided by economic factors, has recently been vindicated by the World Health Organisation.

 If current global trends continue, an estimated 200 million persons world-wide could die prematurely from preventable Illnesses in the 1990s, according to a report on the state of world health released yesterday by the World Health Organisation.
"Disease is the most destructive force In the world", Dr. Hiroshi Najakajina, director general of WHO said in a statement . . .
"many of the world's illnesses are preventable or treatable with inexpensive vaccines, anti-blotics or oral rehydration therapy", Nakajina said. "What Is needed Is to mobilise the political will to make this a healthier world."

The Boston Globe (30 April 1990)

Dr. Nakajina's "political will" cannot solve the problem while capitalism, with its production for profit motive, remains. People are dying today simply because they cannot afford to buy the treatments that would cure them.

What could be a more powerful argument for a new society, based on production solely for use, than the next piece of Information in the WHO report?

 . . . more than 8,000 children die every day from diseases that could have been prevented by immunization, and almost 11.000 die daily of dehydration caused by diarrhoea, the report said. Further, an additional 8,000 die every day of pneumonia, WHO said. Much of the suffering can be alleviated, the report said.

Holiday Competition

The news that Thomson and Intasun, the two biggest package holiday operators, have increased their 1990 prices by around 12% and scrapped over a million holidays from their 1990 plans should surprise no one.

For years they have conducted a fierce price-war which was hailed by the free marketeers as a glorious example of the benefits which competition brings to consumers.

True, prices dropped ever lower in real terms until a holiday in Spain could be bought for a ridiculous £29. But this meant that profits in the industry almost vanished. The average profit on a holiday is now around only £1.20 and many operators have gone bust or been swallowed up.

These tiny profits have meant tiny re-investment, and the resulting decline in standards of holiday hotels and apartments has produced massive customer dissatisfaction and fewer bookings.

So besides providing rising prices and less choice for consumers, the package holiday industry has fallen into fewer and fewer hands until Thomson and Intasun have more than 60% of the market between them. Ah, the benefits of cut-throat competition!

Where Orwell went wrong (1970)

From the June 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many decades now, the ruling classes have employed many devious methods in order to distort working class conceptions of Socialism, and have enjoyed a long success. One of the most successful attempts at distorting working class ideas about Socialism was George Orwell’s horrifying piece of literature 1984. Orwell, a sick and dying man, conjured up visions of a Big Brother state, which many were led to believe would be the result of a Socialist revolution.

Like millions of other people, Orwell’s conceptions were strongly influenced by the outcome of the Russian Revolution, which in actual fact, as all Socialists know, was a capitalist revolution.

The British ruling class did not waste any time in giving Orwell’s ideas widespread propaganda; for after the book was acclaimed by the capitalist press his misconceptions were perpetuated even further through the mass-media of television.

The effects of such harmful anti-Socialist propaganda were only too apparent. Many who had had any beliefs in Socialism became confused.

Orwell’s vision certainly was not of a socialist society where classes will be abolished. But there is now strong evidence to prove that what Orwell really envisaged was the monstrous power of state capitalism which is prevalent throughout the world today. Heavy policing is now being enforced by capitalist governments all over the world; C.S. gas is used against workers, and many other odious methods of repression are used. Demonstrations are photographed, names are recorded, while politicians mouth meaningless words about peace, freedom, and democracy. The exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class has become more and more scientific; in order to increase its wealth millions of workers are enslaved by their capitalist masters, and each individual is timed to the second. Often, when a worker cannot keep up to the speed required of him, his wages are slashed, and it is common for him to be persecuted by the foreman until he is driven out of his job. Workers are even timed when they visit the toilet. When we shop in a supermarket or department store we are watched on a television screen. Even out in the streets of a large city the public are under the watchful eye of Big Brother; the police have televisions on tall buildings. The ruling class have not yet introduced Newspeak, but the national press in Britain is controlled by a small group of milionaires, and the same lies are fed to the British masses daily in order to confuse them even more.

Those who had their ideas of Socialism destroyed by Orwell’s misconceptions should look around in nineteen seventy and they will realise very quickly that the horror of Big Brother has been brought about by the capitalist system of exploitation under which we are living now. The only way to eliminate Big Brother is to abolish the system which has fostered this suppression.

M.

Sting in the Tail: Working Lunch (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Working Lunch (1)

Boots the Chemists recently commissioned research about office workers taking lunch and came up with some alarming figures:

  The survey found more than 25 percent of office-based workers take a break of 30 minutes or less and 20 percent regularly skip lunch altogether. Four out of five regularly eat lunch at their desk. Of these, more than 70 percent continue to work while they eat, and almost 90 percent still answer the phone (Independent, 7 August).

So much then, for those opponents of socialism who claim that socialism won't work because it is “human nature to be lazy”!

Plain Speaking

George Orwell in 1984 speculated about a language called “Newspeak” that would make clear thinking impossible. This allowed those in power to describe the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Peace.

In the Herald (1 November) we learn of a Mr Marcus Harrison sending out electronic mail messages supporting the Gun Lobby against the views of the Snowdrop group. It is a prime example of Ncwspeak in action:

  As a professional communicator. I know how to distort information and manipulate facts . . . Of his offer ‘to distort facts' he argued that was no different from what the media, political spin doctors, or PR people do. 

Mr Harrison describes himself as “a writer/director/producer with 20 years experience in marketing and PR”. He may describe himself as a "professional communicator” and liken himself to “spin doctors and PR people”. but, like the rest of that media circus, he is just a bloody liar.

Working Lunch (2)

A photograph on the front page of the Herald (25 October) depicted the Queen and a rather elegant lady in designer clothes. The caption explained all:

  The Queen and Mrs Jolanta Kwasniewski, wife of the President of Poland, prepare to go into a working lunch at Buckingham Palace, Prince Edward was also present. The Queen later made President Aleksander Kwasniewski a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. 

The last working lunch Scorpion attended the gaffer threatened us all with the Order of the Boot and the P45.

It is about time the Queen, Prince Edward, the Polish President and his elegant wife were given the same Order by the working class.

Papal Progress

The Roman Catholic Church has a dreadful record of scientific suppression. Nicholas Copernicus, the 16th century Polish astronomer, was threatened by the Inquisition because of his heresy of proclaiming that the earth orbited the Sun. instead of the other way about. Indeed less than sixty years after Copernicus' death, the Italian scholar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for similar ideas.

The modern RC church is very adaptable. It now embraces the Copernican view, and a hundred years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species it even accepts evolution!

  The Pope has lent his support to the theory of evolution, proclaiming it compatible with Christian faith. It is likely to cause controversy among the religious right.
  His recognition that evolution is 'more than just a theory' came in a written message he sent to a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a body of experts that advises the Roman Catholic Church on scientific issues ”

(Herald, 25 October).

Wow. what next! A papal endorsement of Marx’s Labour Theory of Value or The Materialist Conception of History? We think not!

Criticism

Let’s face it, critics are an unloved bunch. With hindsight, everyone can look back at those critics who sneered at Van Gogh. Stravinsky and Darwin. They got it all wrong.

But criticism is a very important social function. Everyone should criticise everything. The basis of all progress is criticism. All of those critics who got it wrong were frightened of change. The socialist critic embraces change and says that we live in a society that must be changed.

Well researched, knowledgeable and practical criticism is a pre-requisite for a better society. But even an artist such as Van Gogh can rage against the inequalities of property society. Read his letters to his brother; you may then appreciate just how valid some of his criticisms were whatever your view of his paintings.

A Modern Tragedy

We understand, from those who know such things, that politicians seldom write their own speeches. Recognising this, and being of a kindly disposition towards the beleaguered in our midst, we offer the following lines to the leader of the Tory Party:

"Friends, Tories and Countrymen
Give me your vote
You did love me once
Whence this most foul calumny ?
Have sudden lost you. sweet reason?”

A reference to anything as flattering as reason appertaining to his Tory supporters may convince them to support Honest John again—however briefly.

If we were given to prediction we imagine a nice comfy seat in the House of Lords for John Major. Meanwhile, beyond this farce, continues the tragic reality of workers working for wages and heaping up profits for the owners.

Stop the Newspeak (2000)

From the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the article “Education Serving Capitalism” in the April issue Stan Parker made an enlightening analysis of how schools are used to perpetuate the profit-oriented system. He quoted a prominent World Bank official who admitted that “it is true that schools have ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ and that one of their nominal purposes is to take human ‘raw material’ (i.e. children) and convert it into something more valuable (i.e. employable adults)”.

This kind of mis-education and dubious indoctrination obviously costs something and governments spend large sums to provide it. However, there is another more subtle kind of indoctrination which is not only without cost but is also targeted at adults and not just at students.

Under this type of misinformation, words and phrases are manufactured by the World Bank, IMF, UN, etc for use by their operatives. These catchy words and phrases are then extensively used in books, periodicals and newspapers and picked up by politicians, researchers and the like and parroted without giving them a second thought—”duckspeak” as George Orwell might have put it.

Such vocabulary à la Orwellian Newspeak has the damaging effect of not only distorting and concealing the reality of capitalist exploitation and the class struggle but it also slowly narrows the range of thought. A few examples will suffice here.

Global Village: The capitalist propaganda machine coined this phrase to describe the great achievements in the sphere of communications. This term eulogies the presence of the Concordes, Boeings, Airbuses, telephones, email, TV, the Internet, and what have you in the Information Technology industry. These make it possible for events in one part of the world to be followed simultaneously by people in other parts while improved air transport has made it possible for people to be anywhere on Earth within hours. The term “global village” makes it sound that the globe is a like a real village where people can get up and walk from one end to the other. But what people are not told is that only the minority owning class can afford to pay for this. How many people within the working class can conveniently travel round the globe in the same way as a person walks round a village? We can appreciate the advances made in the communications industry (thanks to the labour of the working class) but the other hidden fact about “global village” is who reaps all the profits from the costly gadgets and the sky-rocketing air fares? “Global village” will only be true to the extent that everyone is able to surf the Internet, more anywhere, telephone anywhere at no cost.

Third World: Unwittingly contradicting their concept of a single global village, the same propagandists come up with the concept of a “Third World”. This idea depicts the “village” not as one but as three: the First (the West), the Second (USSR and East Europe) and the Third (Africa, Latin America and Asia). But in reality there is only one world and the division that exists in it is that there is the class of owners of property and the class of those who own no property. Today’s only world consists of the capitalist class and the working class, the rich and the poor. The term “Third World” is a deliberate misnomer designed to push into the background the class nature of this one world of haves and have-nots.

Enabling Environment: The World Bank, the IMF and the so-called “donor agencies” in general normally make loans available to poor peripheral countries only on condition that these countries create an “enabling environment” for business. This term may appear to the less inquiring mind to mean putting in place genuine structures for development. But the real meaning of the term is devaluing the monetary unit of poor countries; strengthening the army, police and judiciary to hold down the working class whilst these countries’ wealth is plundered without any resistance; selling state assets to private capital owners, etc. In short, “enabling environment” is a euphemism for enslaving the working class more and more.

Stakeholders: This is another phrase which is constantly used unquestioningly by NGO staff and government officials. These people revel in repeating their master’s voice without actually understanding it. “Stakeholder” is a term coined to deceive the people that projects in poor countries benefit all those involved: the donor agency, the government and the target group (the poor people). The term sends the wrong signal that all three categories are equal. But the truth is that the working people (the target group) who provide the labour component of the project are always disadvantaged. However, the government boosts its image by posing as the middleman while the capitalists reap benefit as they sell their products (all the machinery and other materials used in the project).

Collapse of Communism: The capitalists and their bankrupt media and academia ignorantly refer to socialism/communism as a system in which the means of production are controlled by the state. With such crass stupidity the capitalists thought that the former Soviet Union and the East European states were communist. People were taught to think this as a means of deliberately camouflaging the truth that the USSR and Eastern Europe were actually profit-oriented entities practising state-capitalism. Therefore as soon as perestroika took hold of the USSR and the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Western powers got another hypocritical opportunity to trumpet repeatedly to the whole world that communism/socialism was dead. But what actually happened in the USSR and Eastern Europe was that state capitalism gave way to Western-style capitalism. In other words, state control of the means of producing and distributing wealth was replaced by individual and corporate control.

Asian Tigers: Fortunately, the capitalist propaganda machine can’t stand the test of time. A clear example is the recent joke of the “Asian Tigers”. To conceal the facts surrounding the pillage and plunder of the human and material resources of the “tiger economies”, the world was inundated with the false story of the success of these Asian peripheral countries. But the lies blew up in their face one morning as the world woke up to see that the tigers had not only lost their teeth but their clawed paws had gone numb.

The important question in the face of such dubious misinformation is whether humanity can afford just to wait until the capitalists confess and swallow their own untruths as time exposes them. This would amount to condoning crime. Therefore humanity must act. The first step should be to grasp the socialist (which is humane) understanding of society; people must know the real causes (not the ones based on faith) of poverty, want, disease, illiteracy, the purpose of production of wealth, etc. Armed with the basic principles of socialism one can easily see through the pseudo-philosophies and phrase-mongering tactics of those presently gagging humanity and human progress just in the interests of their super-profits.

Suhuyini