Filthy Rich (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the main points of the argument put forward by the SPGB is that capitalist society is divided into two classes; the working class, the largely propertlyless majority, and the capitalist class, those who own most of the wealth produced in the world and the physical means to make more of it. It is easy to identify the working class. For example you can see them at certain hours of the day pouring into the factories, offices, shops, mines railway stations etc. in order to work. That is why they are called workers. They receive at the end of their week or month’s work, a pay packet or salary cheque — the price at which they have sold their labour-power to the boss. Basically this will permit them to purchase sufficient to allow themselves and their families to subsist until the next pay packet. That’s simple.

But it is sometimes not quite so easy physically to identify the capitalist class. True you see the odd chauffeur driven Rolls with its owner frequently sprawled across the back seat, the assembly at Ascot, and those going in and out of Claridges, the Ritz etc. But some highly paid workers will use Claridges, so that can be confusing. And many members of the working class will go to Ascot to mimic the pastimes of their class exploiters. So identification lines can become blurred. In particular, when wealth ownership itself has become a most complicated and intricate network of title to deeds, bonds, shares etc. it all adds to the difficulty of identification It is no wonder many people are confused and ask the SPGB “Who are the capitalist class?” “Where are the capitalist class?” and so on.

Where there's a will

Well ironicaly, one of the easiest methods of identifying someone’s class position is not by the facts of his life, but by the effects of his death. When a worker dies, after funeral expenses have been paid, the H.P. company sorted out etc. there is not usually much left. Very often nothing at all. Born with nothing, the worker dies with nothing, leaving “not a rack behind” as Shakespeare put it. But the death of a capitalist is a different matter. For one thing it is noted in the papers — it is news. The Times for example runs a short daily column headed “Latest Wills”. Now these are not any old Wills — when you die, not only will they not bother to write your obituary in the Times, they won’t put in their latest Wills column how much you left to your family and friends. But a glance at the column for any day will show something interesting. The paper’s column for Wednesday July 14th 1976 (chosen entirely at random) is quite short. It reads as follows:

Lord Elphinsone of Drumkilbo, Meigle, Tayside, a first cousin of the Queen, has left estate totalling £890,907 gross according to his will published in Perth yesterday. It included £178,019 abroad. Other estates, include . . . Atkin, Mrs. Anita Constance Irene of Tonbridge £163,424; Bennett, Lady of Highgate, wife of Sir Thomas Bennett £143,390; Hawkin, Mrs. Levu Colin, of Caine, butcher, £345,293; Segravc, Mr. Charles Rodney of Chobham £515,275.

(The figures do not show the tax that will be payable on the deaths. Equally they do not show the amount the individual may have “disposed of” prior to death in part to avoid taxes. The true representation of the individual’s wealth may be much higher than the amount given.)

Another column which frequently pinpoints the capitalist at his hour of death is the obituary column. You don’t need to have done anything of note to merit an entry — provided you were very rich. J. Paul Getty died on 7th June this year. Some of the points about him which appeared from the Times of the next day are the following; at his death he was “estimated” (i.e. he was so rich they could not even count all his money and it had to be guessed) to be worth £1,000 million; he “lived simply amid considerable splendour at Sutton Place, near Guildford, the Elizabethan mansion set in 1,000 acres”; lest this home was not “simple” enough (how much more fawning can the capitalist press be than to say he lived “simply” — the reporter ought to visit some working class homes, or look round his own, and then see if Getty lived simply) he was having another house built for him at Malibu California where “he had built a museum to house his £100 million art collection”; by the age of 21 he had “made” 2 million dollars (but he had of course a rather good send off from his millionaire father), and by the same age he had had 2 divorces, (3 more marriages and divorces to follow); this displeased his “earnest Methodist” father, so much so that when the father died, he gave Getty only 500,000 dollars of his estate of 10 million dollars; but fear not, our hero was “not disheartened by the smallness of the legacy for he already had 4 million dollars of his own”; and on and on.

Thrift and Humbug

Like so many members of the class that has no social function whatever other than to accumulate the wealth produced by workers, Getty was fond of giving his opinions to all who cared to listen (and he was so rich many people did listen). The capitalist press repeat these pearls so that the swine before whom they are cast and who produced the wealth for him can be suitably impressed by the wisdom of their masters. For example; “The advice he was prone to give to others he had followed himself. This was to ‘be thrifty, save a little money and have a small surplus for investment’.” Or what about this gem: “He did not believe in charity. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, 'why I should distribute money right and left to people because they ask for it’”! well, quite right too! after all, if the world is so madly organized as to allow most people to live in want and provide Getty with such a crazy superabundance why should he be such a damn fool (as his methodist father with his religion humbug would no doubt have put it) as to give it back to them?

That’s one sadly deceased member of the parasite class. What about some living ones? The death of Getty brought forth speculations as to who was the richest person in the world now that both Getty and Howard Hughes are dead. As the Sunday Times reported (9/6/76) there is no shortage of candidates. Some of the most obvious candidates are to quote the Sunday Times “comparatively hard up”. Into that category they put people like Henry Ford, Woodruff of Coca Cola, Benton of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Forest E. Mars of Mars Bar fame and Dewott Wallace of Readers Digest. Some of the legendary wealthy American families (Rockefellers and the like) can’t compete for the title either because they have been too “busily giving their money away to distant members of the family in a desperate effort to avoid tax.” One possible candidate is Al Tajir. He is the ambassador to Britain from the United Arab Emirates and also their advisor on oil. He “has accrued his vast wealth from a variety of sources — mining in Africa, property in Western Europe, businesses in the Persian Gulf and Lebanon . . . he did once boast that whereas many governments would find it hard — if not impossible — to raise a billion dollars . . . it would take him only a morning” However the Sunday Times suggests that the man who must take the crown is currently little-known 78-year-old American, Daniel K. Ludwig.

Although it appears that Ludwig is somewhat coy about disclosing the extent of his interests (and he may not know — as Getty is supposed to have said, “you can’t be that rich if you know how much you have got”, it seems they include the following: “The American company National Bulk Carriers, a huge fleet of tankers, a shipyard in Japan, a large share in the National Mortgage Bank in America, a deep water port in Florida, a big interest in potash in Ethiopia, iron ore in India, oranges in Panama, a million acres of Venezuela, 3 million acres of Brazil and large chunks of Australia and the United States.”

A Bijou Nest

Another quietly comfortable family is the “Royal”. Despite the cries of poverty from them that have in recent years tugged at the worker’s heartstrings, the owners of the little home standing in the exclusive 40 acres of ground at Buckingham Palace (an estate agent’s dream) can’t be that hard up. They have recently bought a small present for their son-in-law and daughter. It is, according to the Daily Mail (24/6/76 a “730 acre property — complete with trout lake, a conservatory as long as a cricket pitch, 200 acres of mature woodland, a 530 acre farm, a folly and stables.” Mind you according to the report the stables probably need doing up, the kitchen (not that the dear couple can be expected to be doing that much washing up themselves) needs a coat or two of paint, the billiard room has a “dusty unused look and has been used as a store” (how low can you get?) and in general the 5 principal bedrooms, five secondary bedrooms (for the staff) and the four reception rooms clearly need tarting up. No doubt the locals will be able to see Anne and Mark on Saturday afternoon, their shirt sleeves rolled up to their royal elbows, scrubbing away for many years to come. No wonder the Queen only paid a bargain £750,000 for it.

Enough has been said to show that the capitalist class are still alive and well and thriving off the wealth produced by the workers. Though whether it is possible to identify them makes no difference to the system itself, or those that suffer from it. Whether you see your exploiter or not, he still exists. The workers in the so-called nationalized industries do not “know” their boss. Nonetheless they are still working for the sole benefit of a class other than their own, and it is from their work that all that wealth (only some examples of which have been mentioned in this article) comes. The wealth is produced not by the brains of the capitalist class but by the work of their employees. Quite simply what happens is that when the worker draws his wage, he does not receive from the boss the equivalent of what he has produced for him. He gets back just a proportion of the amount he has produced. The balance, i.e. the profit, is pocketed by the capitalist class and used to allow the Gettys and the ordinary rich to thrive. And they will continue to suck like the social leeches they are, until the working class as a whole say “Enough!" and decide to end property society once and for all.

Ronnie Warrington

Art—for whose sake? (1984)

Getty.

From the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

A spectre, to paraphrase one of the world’s most paraphrased sayings, is haunting the upper-upmarket auction rooms of England. The Getty factor threatens to deprive anyone with ambitions to buy a masterpiece of art of their sleep at night. The very mention of it is, apparently, enough to send prices rocketing away out into the great unknown where records are broken for the splashing out of huge amounts of money on a picture or a piece of sculpture. Broken sleep does not, of course, trouble the auctioneers, whose commission flourishes under the higher prices induced by the Getty factor.

This powerful influence operates from across the Atlantic, from the museum in Malibu. California endowed out of the riches of the late Paul Getty. It is an enormously wealthy museum, with an unprecedented amount of money available for building up its collection. If it shows any interest in a sale the bidding takes on a new force. This is much in Getty’s style for he was one of those capitalists who reap so much profit from their capital, and own so much wealth, that the accountants hardly know what it all adds up to. His money came from the oil industry; not that he actually drilled the wells, or pumped the oil himself—that was the role of the workers. So, to be more exact. Getty’s money came from the exploitation of the oil industry’s workers. In the time honoured tradition, having screwed vast amounts of surplus value from the useful, productive people. Getty assured himself a place in their affections as a public benefactor by giving a fraction back in things like the museum. That affection was mixed with some sympathy, for Getty was an embodiment of the theory, a popular comfort for penniless workers, that riches do not make for happiness. Clearly, Getty did not hold with the theory himself, to the end of his days preferring the misery of riches, living in lugubrious seclusion at a large Elizabethan manor in Surrey to the joys of poverty in a council high rise flat in somewhere like Hackney.

The Getty factor was active recently when the Duke of Devonshire—who is not renowned for being unhappy about his riches—sent a collection of ancient drawings for auction at Christies. This firm is in the top drawer in the trade; their staff are discreetly dinner-jacketed and, if requested, conceal a successful bidder’s identity in a civilised mumble. In this urbane atmosphere the Devonshire drawings were sold for over £21 million, of which at least £13½ million went to the Duke after he has paid tax and, of course, a commission to the suave auctioneers. The Getty museum shelled out some £7 million for seven items. Works of art are not typical of capitalist production; not being reproducible they are not commodities and do not, therefore, conform to the economic laws, such as the law of value, which govern the mass of capitalism's products. When they are exchanged, there are other influences at work.

The “loss” of the Devonshire drawings to overseas buyers was greeted with a predictable sigh of regret from the sort of people who worry about Paul Getty’s and the Duke of Devonshire’s happiness. The Guardian (5 July 1984) wailed:

The auction, with its crazy prices, has exposed the fickleness of the market and the country’s weakness in protecting its heritage.

This was predictable because there is usually a protest when some member of the British ruling class sells a work of art for export. No matter that it may have lain in some closely private collection, unseen by anyone apart from a privileged few; its export is regarded as a "loss to the nation". Some years ago the state set up a machinery designed to delay such exports, with a government-backed agency—the National Heritage Memorial Fund—which is supposed to intervene. But even by their own standards those who worry about this "national heritage" are talking nonsense. Very few works by British artists figure in the big sales: Devonshire, for example, sold pictures by Raphael (Italian). Van Dyck (Flemish). Rembrandt (Dutch). Holbein (German). It is stretching the sensible meaning of patriotism, nonsensical as it is, to attach a British nationality to a work which was wholly produced in another country by a foreign artist. The protests were in fact based on the crudest form of patriotism, the sort of madness which demands that British people should not only win all the wars and all the games of football, cricket and tennis and run the fastest races but should also make the best films and monopolise world trade and also, somewhere, own all the most coveted pieces of art.

Well one person who might agree about the wars, the sport and the trade is the Duke of Devonshire himself. A man of substance, he is the eleventh in a line of Dukes who began in 1694; before that they were not exactly on the breadline, being mere Barons, Earls and Marquesses. The Devonshire's—their family name is Cavendish—are interlocked through marriage with many other ancient tribes of the British ruling class. The present Duke went to Eton and Cambridge and during the war he did his appropriate bit to protect his riches in a fashionable regiment of the Guards. At a bad time for the Conservative Party, he was their unsuccessful candidate in Chesterfield. (The parliamentary seat of West Derbyshire had been held by a Cavendish, with one short break, since 1885 until a by-election in 1944. The then heir to the Dukedom was dutifully adopted as the Tory candidate but the voters perhaps misunderstood all that wartime propaganda about equality of sacrifice and decided that the Cavendishes had to sacrifice West Derbyshire. They elected a Labour Independent instead.)

The present Duke held some minor jobs under Harold Macmillan (another relation—he married the 9th Duke's daughter) and he is president of a number of depressingly titled charities like the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. He possesses huge houses at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Lismore Castle in Co. Waterford and belongs to the traditional exclusive London clubs. He should be—and probably thinks of himself as—a stout patriot. Except that, not untypically, the blood of money runs for him rather thicker than the waters of patriotism. Devonshire could have done the patriotic thing and sold his drawings to "the nation” for about £5½ million, which would have satisfied the average pools punter. But he preferred to go to auction on the chance that this would bring in more than "the nation" were prepared to pay. This is not the first time the ruling class have shown that for them patriotism has a price and that it is the working class who are expected to accept all that nonsense without question or concern for their own interests.

The Cavendishes should know a thing or two about this particular confidence trick for they are among the oldest of British ruling class families. One of them killed Wat Tyler, which caused his father, who as a Chief Justice was not popular among the desperate peasantry of 14th century England, to be dragged revengefully from his home in Suffolk and beheaded. The family really took off in the 16th century, when William Cavendish was Gentleman-Usher to Cardinal Wolsey. The title is misleadingly urbane; the foundations of what Burke’s Peerage coyly calls his "greatness" were laid when Cavendish got his cut from the Dissolution of the Monasteries, an episode which promoted the fortunes of many a murderous feudal bandit.

The pictures sold by the present Duke were part of an enormous, vastly valuable collection—he still has about 2.000 of them—which his ancestors made in the 17th and 18th centuries. That was the time when the British ruling class were rising towards the world's dominant power. It is customary for such a class to buy, or plunder. works of art as an investment, or as expensive showpieces, or simply to assert their dominance. The stately homes of this country became crammed with art treasures from all over the world; as Britain declines as a world power they are draining away—to the regret of ignorant workers who think that their interests are involved in the power of their masters and mistresses.

The Devonshire sale was quickly followed by an anonymous buyer paying over £7 million for a Turner painting which had been owned by the late Lord Clark of television fame—another man who disappointed that popular working-class theory by apparently finding no inconsistency between riches and a contented, fulfilling life. A couple of days later a painting by a relatively minor 17th century artist brought £900,000 at Christies. Does this mean that, spurred on by the Getty factor, there will now be a rush of record-breaking sales? A slump is not an inappropriate time for the world's capitalists to invest their millions in some static articles rather than in speculatively dynamic production. At all events it shows that there is a section in society who are able to survive the recession in a style rather different from that of Social Security claimants. But of course there are some consolations for the workers: they do not have to worry about the Getty factor, which does not influence the price of prints of blue-faced Chinese women or of stampeding elephants or of a flight of plaster ducks climbing up the wall away from the stereo. What should worry the working class—indeed it should do more than worry them is the restriction and the distortion of their talents and their tastes which that represents. Their acquaintance with, and access to artistic experience is cruelly confined to the terms set by the ruling class and hampered by their need to spend almost all their time, their energy and their resources on the basic matter of getting a living. They should also concern themselves that it is from their labour alone that the wealth comes to be monopolised by a small group of world parasites, providing for them a lifestyle which thinks little of paying a fortune for a single work of art.

The smooth operators in the auction rooms, talking of money in millions, say it in another way. For the workers there is misery and exploitation and a poverty of access to the best things in life. For the capitalists it is different: not so much a pretty picture, more a way of life.

Ivan

The World in their Wallets (1982)

Quote from the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “No one is really rich if he can count his money," said oil billionaire Paul Getty. It's a daunting definition and narrows the field considerably for it means not just having millions, but tens and even hundreds of millions of pounds. But daunting or not there are plenty of people determinedly and unashamedly on their way there.
   For the rest of the world who aren’t Paul Gettys, “rich" means being a millionaire. And millionaires are a thriving clan. Once a unique club of the landed, titled and moguls of established business empires, now their ranks are being swelled by the glitter- and glamour-loving breed of the world's top sportsmen and rock stars, oil sheiks and inventors, whizz kids and entrepreneurs. Britain alone has 4,000 people worth at least a million pounds and whole industries have been set up to cater for their jet-set lifestyles—the cars, the parties, and the expensive demands of their beautiful women.
  And these are merely the rich. The very rich are worth up to £20 million the super-rich have amassed up to £35 million (around 60 million dollars)—and only then do you consider that you might stop counting.

From the News of the World Magazine. 17 October, 1982.